Nicolola Tangen: Hi everybody. Uh, welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today we have the founder and CEO of Figma visiting us, Dylan Field. Now, quite incredibly, uh, Dylan founded Figma when he was 19 years old. And now 14 years later, Figma had one of the biggest IPO uh, IPOs of 2025. So, warm welcome.

Dylan Field: Thank you for having me.

Nicolola Tangen: So, um, Dylan, we have to start. What does Figma do? Yes.

Dylan Field: So, Figma is a platform that helps you go from an idea in your head to a production application uh in the software space, but also once you ship something uh once you ship some software, you want to then market it. And we also help with that too.

Dylan Field: We help you get your brand out there uh and make it so you can create more collateral around it. And ultimately, it's not just some linear process where you have an idea and you get to finish product and you're done. uh perhaps in the industrial design world, we were talking about that before we started, that's more of what it is, but in software, it's always a loop and you're always iterating and you're learning and you're trying to figure out how do I evolve this thing that I've created with my team and uh we try to make it very collaborative so designers can bring their entire team in to do that. Uh

Nicolola Tangen: so listen now I'm I'm uh I run a cup factory. Okay, so now I'm going to design a new cup. Uh here we go. We are like four people. they want to design a cup. How do we use your software?

Dylan Field: Uh we have people that will maybe draw cups or maybe they will market their cups on Figma, but we're not a piece of software for uh 3D or you know CAD design. And so that's typically not what people use for. But I'm always amazed when people will draw 3D assets like a beautiful cup with a amazing shadow and incredible lighting in Figma. Not what it's made for, but people do it. M that said uh yeah CAD is an entirely different area and we really stick to digital design.

Nicolola Tangen: Why is um why is design such an important differentiator?

Dylan Field: So I think going back a bit uh and speaking about digital product design the history of design I think is interesting in the digital realm because for a long time there were very very few designers. Almost none of them had a traditional art school background or very few did. And many of them randomly found their way into design.

Dylan Field: Sometimes from engineering, sometimes they were in a band and made a poster. Uh it could come from any different place. But there's a period of time in uh for example 2000 uh the dot era where the mantra was build it and they will come. And at that point, if you had a designer, which was rare, the sort of role of design was conceived to be what uh sometimes in America we call lipstick on a pig. The uh you know, you got a pig, but we're going to put some lipstick on it to make it pretty. And it was really about making it uh aesthetically pleasing, but not thinking about the function, the form, how it works. M

Dylan Field: and that has changed dramatically over the past 25 years.

Dylan Field: First we got to the 2010 era where you not only have Apple evangelizing design and saying how it works matters. this is why you should buy this iPhone with Steve Jobs championing design. But also you have the advent of consumer applications like Facebook or Gmail and suddenly the expectations rise and at the same time you know things like AWS cloud computing are starting to pick up and we've moved from a world of managed servers to cloud from box software to app stores and it's easier than ever uh to build software as well. Because developer tools are improving.

Dylan Field: And as all this is happening, what's happening to the distribution? Well, no longer are we in the world of build and they will come. Uh we're starting to transition out of that into a world where well, if you build it and you have really great design and really great marketing, then you might have a chance uh because there's more software and it's not the case anymore that you're building something. It's the only thing like that that exists in the world. competition is increasing and the value is moving up the stack.

Nicolola Tangen: Now your initial goal was to I think you say eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. What does that mean?

Dylan Field: Yeah. So when we started uh I painted a pretty broad vision for where we could go partially because I didn't know exactly where we were going to go. Uh you know we had a hammer that was WebGL. And I think that there's always this uh why now for great companies. Something's changed in the world. And the why now is uh something you can look back on and you can point at one or two or three of them and say this is why this company came to exist at this particular time.

Dylan Field: And for us we thought okay let's look at technology that's changing. We're computer scientists. Uh my co-founder Evan he is beyond brilliant. He was my TA at Brown and he had done quite a lot of exploration into WebGL. Uh Evan is not just a 10x better engineer than I am. He's like a 100x better better engineer than I am. M uh

Nicolola Tangen: you called him Jesus or something, right?

Dylan Field: Uh well, I did not call him Jesus. Uh but that was his nickname in middle school was computer Jesus or CJ for short. Uh I later learned um I called him Evan. Uh but uh he is a brilliant man

Dylan Field: and I was very very lucky to get to work with him and uh I mean design is some right brain stuff right but you have your background also in like in math and physics. Uh so why is rigor so important here?

Dylan Field: Yeah, I wish I had done more physics. Um, I can't claim that. I've done some math, but not enough. And I think that you both want the ability to think in abstraction in design as well as the ability to have the EQ and emotionally connect with the end user. And so, uh, of course there's also aesthetic, there's judgment, there's thinking about, uh, things temporally, there's thinking about frameworks. Uh but there yeah there's many skills that come together in order to understand all that context and to bring into one place and to create a great user experience.

Dylan Field: And we're not even getting to sort of the top of the pyramid of the mass hierarchy of needs for design where you start to think about delight and joy and what does it mean to make something that people love. Uh and that's I think more of the art of it. Uh not many people can do that but when you can when you can apply that craft it's so special and those out.

Nicolola Tangen: So if you were to kind of distill down the design principles of Figma, do you do you have such we have many I mean would they be if

Dylan Field: we have many I mean some of the ones that I think that a lot uh one is keep the simple things simple but make the complex things possible.

Dylan Field: So in Figma as with any tool especially software where you're constantly updating and you're adding more things to respond to the market we're not talking about like a hammer. We're talking about something that is a complex uh ecosystem of operations and functionality and you want it to be a staircase where you can take that first step or the second step very easily but then if you keep going you can actually achieve mastery

Dylan Field: and that mastery is so important. So we want to make it so that there's a balance between power and simplicity at all times. That balance is extremely hard to achieve. So we have to constantly remind ourselves and our users and our team of this that we need to make those right trade-offs because approachability is I think a flip side of it which is you come into Figma. Does it feel like an inviting environment? Are you welcomed or do you go oh my gosh this is like stepping into an airplane cockpit. I don't know how to fly. We want it to be that you're welcomed of course.

Nicolola Tangen: So you but you and you welcome a lot of people right? You got like a huge community. Um you got a lot of kind of plug-in solutions. Just how do you think about that whole ecosystem?

Dylan Field: So from the start, the community has been critical for Figma. We are so lucky to have an amazing design community around us and they gave us feedback and attention when frankly we had no reason for them to. Uh you know I would cold email designers that were my heroes at the start of Figma and just ask them to check out this thing I built

Dylan Field: and they would sit down with me. and I'd get them a coffee and they would give me like an hour-ong master class on not just design but advice on how to go build the tool that they wanted.

Nicolola Tangen: So, how do they help you develop products now?

Dylan Field: Well, so many ways. Uh we try to be very tapped into our community. So,

Nicolola Tangen: and who are these community people? What what type of people are they?

Dylan Field: Uh well, designers, like I said, come from all backgrounds, but uh we've got um over 80% of our weekly active users outside the United States. And so it's not necessarily like just United States, it's everywhere in the world. Uh and we have friends of Figma chapters, user groups all over the place too that are community-led. We also try to gather people together in one place every year for our annual user conference Config. We're free for education. So student communities are extremely important to us

Dylan Field: because they're the future and they are always teaching us about what we need to go do in order to meet their needs because they're always a little bit ahead of everybody else. Mhm.

Dylan Field: Um but yeah, we also have online forums. We've got uh we're always trying to monitor and uh respond and engage on social media and uh we also do a lot of qualitative and quantitative research and so all that along with just the standard sales process uh creates dialogue and creates conversation lets us tap into the headsp space of our customers.

Nicolola Tangen: How will AI change all this?

Dylan Field: Well, I think AI is a ch force that will change everything, of course, and um you know exactly how much. That's what we're both trying to figure out all the time. But I believe that AI will both lower the floor, make it so that more people can come into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it so that creative professionals, designers will be able to do so much more uh than they ever could before and truly uh be able to lean into their craft because I think what AI does is it makes it so that you can explore an entire option space uh of what you can build, what you can design, And then from that option space, you can sample. You can see what resonates, what you think is great, what you think actually you shouldn't go into. You can use that to figure out a direction and then you can push further in that direction. Whereas if you were going to do it without AI, you could only sample a few points from that option space. AI lets you sample more.

Dylan Field: So that way you can have more intentionality about the path you choose.

Nicolola Tangen: How important is taste in this new world?

Dylan Field: I think it's incredibly important. Going back to the uh question earlier, um design as a differentiator, I believe that is like the world we are in and people don't fully appreciate yet.

Dylan Field: This has been my thesis for the past decade. It's not just an AI thing, but AI accelerates it because we're on an exponential curve of the amount of software in the world right now.

Nicolola Tangen: What is taste?

Dylan Field: Uh this is a whole podcast in itself. Um, I think that uh taste is a loop that you're in where you are always trying to develop an understanding of what resonates with you and what doesn't. And based on that, you're trying to create frameworks to figure out what it is that you value, how it connects to your uh not just aesthetic values, but your personal inner values. and based on that working to express that in a form that others can consume.

Dylan Field: uh and I think it's not just discriminating in terms of I like this, I don't like that, but also taste is uh an enabler of building amazing things and it is the hardest skill to develop uh to have good taste, but also it is I think it just brings richness to your life in a way that uh I don't think everyone appreciates yet. And the other thing is taste

Nicolola Tangen: what what is Dylan Field's taste

Dylan Field: on what?

Nicolola Tangen: Open-ended question.

Dylan Field: Well, um I care a lot about complexity and being able to understand the world. So I think I've got a lot of taste when it comes to framework building mental models. Uh that applies to design as well. If you can clearly communicate a mental model to a user in a visual form, uh I think that's a great thing. And not everyone's able to do that properly because if you think about it, if I design the right chair for you, for example, that might not be the right chair for me. You know, we've got different bodies. Uh and perhaps, you know, we could create something custom for both of us. And yet there's a reason why we create the same software for everyone. Uh and there's a reason why beyond mass production we lean into how to create uh you know the same chair in a bigger run.

Dylan Field: It's I think uh this opportunity to actually apply craft and figure out what is it that you can do to as an expression of yourself put something into the digital or physical world.

Nicolola Tangen: Does AI have taste?

Dylan Field: I think AI is still a pattern matching machine. Uh, and humans have taste and it's been trained in the data. And so if you can RHF the right parts of AI, you can emulate taste. But that's only with advanced prompting that you can access it. And so perhaps prompters have taste and can pull it out of this pattern matching machine with a sophisticated large model. Uh, but I think that's not the end of the journey. I I generally think the first prompt that people do is only the starting point and instead you need to keep going and that could be you know we have a product called Figma make prompt to working application and one thing we do with Figma make is make it so that you can go from the code output and copy it into Figma design which is a free form design tool not attached to code. The reason we do that is so that way you can explore in this more open way across a digital canvas that's infinite

Dylan Field: and you can riff and you can explore in a nonlinear way all sorts of variations to really figure out visually and reason visually about what it is that resonates with you what feels right what doesn't feel right uh what solves your problems how do you constraint solve for the different outcomes and the more that you do that the more you realize okay I have this path but it has this trade-off, I have this path, it has this other trade-off. You don't actually understand that until you see those branching paths of where things can go.

Nicolola Tangen: What what what part of this process is it that AI can't replicate?

Dylan Field: I think that the context that designers have uh is extremely hard, perhaps impossible to replicate.

Dylan Field: So, think about yourself. You have a lived context. You have your identity, but also all of your experiences. You have all sorts of things you've interacted with in the physical world across your life. You're part of various cultures that you intersect with and interact with. Uh and you come with mental models informed by the languages that you've learned. Uh and from there you're coming into an experience being used to other experiences. Uh and then the designer's task is to create something for you that also applies to others. And it's a thing of the moment. It is related to the culture of the moment. And it also needs to achieve business goals. It needs to be something that's testable. And that based on those tests, you can iterate on it. But you don't want to get to a local max. You want to get to the global max. And uh I I just don't think that AI is very close to doing that task yet. uh it's definitely not close to the point of getting to where you can actually have AI do deep user research and understand the problems and the needs of the end customer.

Nicolola Tangen: Do you think taste around the world will diverge or come together?

Dylan Field: So, I went to China in 2016. I've only been there once. Uh and amazing culture, the most uh hospitality I've ever found in the world. And uh the people I met were just incredible. You ride the subway there and you look at uh the way that people use mobile applications and the way they're designed and they're just completely different in the United States. The density of the typography, the bias towards a super app uh and the way that people are are in general interacting with technology there. Yeah, it's it's just completely different. So I think the divergence already exists first of all.

Nicolola Tangen: Mhm.

Dylan Field: Uh I think the counter example would be Hollywood where somehow uh we've got this American export of media that has become a global phenomenon. M

Dylan Field: and even in today's age where more content is being created bottoms up across the world, Hollywood and the uh sort of American media complex has incredible enormous reach and ability to influence culture. And so I think that perhaps uh for the lowest common denominator of taste that's something that is pervasive and more uniform. But I think as you start to go into any given niche, which I think we'll see a lot more of those niches going forward, we already are, then I think that those subcultures create their own aesthetic, their own point of view uh and sort of their own language and sometimes around uh what they are valuing and how they see the world.

Nicolola Tangen: What is design going to look like in 10 years time?

Dylan Field: 10 years is a long time to make predictions about right now in a world where AI is a chaotic force that uh could be exponential but then if you really draw that exponential the earth is covered every square inch of data centers uh so something might not eventually keep up with the exponential or perhaps we have data centers in space I don't know in any case I believe that the role of design will continue to uh elevate And

Dylan Field: what are the real moes in software? Now I think that uh liquidity liquidity of data liquidity in a marketplace uh liquidity of social interaction um those are modes. There are businesses where you have these individuals interacting in a certain way uh or there's regulatory constraints that could be a moat. But we can name many more. But in general, I think that a lot less software has modes than in the past.

Nicolola Tangen: Mhm.

Dylan Field: And also software is so much easier to create.

Dylan Field: Now, I'm not of the mind that you're going to go and uh vibe code your way to Salesforce or Workday. I think the people that are saying that right now are maybe extrapolating a bit too much. But I think in general we're going to uh see so much more competition and design will be a huge part of why you win or lose as will craft as will point of view

Nicolola Tangen: but it seems like vibe coding is tailing off a bit but you are not tailing off.

Dylan Field: Yeah we have seen it continue to grow. Um, and for Figma, I think that the opportunity to help in the B2B context, designers, product managers, anyone adjacent to designer be able to prototype in an easier way as well as get things into production or make an internal app. Uh, that is a use case that's just starting. So, I think it's bifurcated. There's a consumer aspect too and we care about that of course. I mean getting people the access to design, their ability to create and express that's so so important to us.

Dylan Field: And also uh I believe that um you know our focus right now and the thing that we are really trying to make sure that we are world class at is more of that B2B side because I think it transfers over the consumer side later on.

Nicolola Tangen: How important is the integration with the chatb?

Dylan Field: Chat is a learning moment for us still. So we are exploring that in the context of Fig Jim, our whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming product.

Dylan Field: And uh it's been really cool to see how people are using the context they create in these chatbt sessions in order to then bring into Fig Jam uh with our Figma app on Chat GBT and we're learning a lot. It's it's too early to to really give an answer there.

Nicolola Tangen: How is um AI changing the way you lead the company?

Dylan Field: So I think that it's really important that not just our R&D team but the company in general have AI fluency and

Dylan Field: this doesn't just mean like cost cutting because I think there's sort of two frameworks people come from when it comes to AI. Uh, and I I always think back to uh this dinner I was at maybe nine months ago, 10 months ago with a neighbor. And uh they have two teenagers, uh, a boy and a girl, both in high school. And

Dylan Field: the question at the dinner table was, "How do you use AI?" And the son says, "Well, I I get to hang out with my friends more. I get to work out more. Uh, love an AI. It's doing a lot of my homework for me. It's great." The daughter goes, "Yeah, it's been really, really helpful. I have used it to generate 3x the problem sets so I can really study for the tests ahead. Uh, and it's been amazing as a learning assistant for me."

Nicolola Tangen: I suspect you are in the letter camp.

Dylan Field: Yeah, I'm much more in the like I want to learn as much as possible from everything, but I think it's applicable to companies, too. Yeah.

Nicolola Tangen: I'm not saying it's an either or. You can do both. But are you going to be exclusively focused on cost cutting

Nicolola Tangen: or are you going to look for the new opportunities that AI enables?

Dylan Field: Well, so I think if you focus in on cost cutting too early, you're just going to slow down the whole process because people don't want to be uh you know cut.

Dylan Field: Well, that too. Uh but I also think that there's an opportunity to make it that people are more productive

Dylan Field: but also doing their job in a better way.

Nicolola Tangen: Yeah. Does it have implications? Going back to raising the ceiling,

Nicolola Tangen: does it have implications for what implications does it have for who you hire?

Nicolola Tangen: So you know how many people? You are 1, how many00?

Dylan Field: About 1,800ish

Nicolola Tangen: 1,800 now. So what does it mean for who you hire?

Dylan Field: You know, I think this is uh one of the critical debates that the software industry is going through right now is does AI mean that you should hire senior people or middle level or junior or or all the jobs going to go away because AI will replace them all. Uh I've heard that one the last one a bunch of times and then it hasn't come true yet. All the people have said that they continue to hire. So I my bias actually is a lot more towards the junior folks. And I think that people that are younger are AI native in a way that folks that are older uh have to learn. And that doesn't mean that we don't hire a mix. We do. Uh we've always had a mix of you know seniority levels at Figma. But I think that it is important that people come in first of all knowing that we're pushing full steam ahead into the AI era. So if you have a bias against AI, that's a great dinner table conversation between us, but we're very focused on making sure that we build for this AI age.

Nicolola Tangen: What's the average age of your people?

Dylan Field: Uh I don't have that number off hand.

Nicolola Tangen: What do you think?

Dylan Field: I would guess about uh 35 36.

Nicolola Tangen: Okay. Does it have any implications for um the pool you hire from? Is it narrower or wider than before?

Dylan Field: The pool we're hiring from has only grown wider over time. Uh been kind of incredible to see that growth because I think back to the earliest days of Figma and recruiting was so hard.

Nicolola Tangen: No, but I mean you I'm sure you've got thousands of people applying but the type of people, the type of educational background that they have, has that changed at all?

Dylan Field: No, we don't. um I made sure that we don't look at degrees uh as part of the hiring process. So, uh perhaps there's bias that slips in somewhere, but my point of view is that it shouldn't matter whether you've graduated college or not because coming from my own perspective, I didn't graduate from college. uh and I think that unfortunately the value of a college degree will be uh plummeting in terms of external perception not necessarily the value of the college education.

Dylan Field: Uh I think that college will be a amazing place if you can afford it. But uh that said I think that you know going back to that dinner table conversation how do you know that someone actually learned all the things they said they did from their diploma?

Nicolola Tangen: Do you think do you think you would have done better in life if you had graduated from college?

Dylan Field: Uh just depends on the dimension you're talking about. Uh you know the counterfactual joke sorry the counterfactual is always hard right? Uh but um

Nicolola Tangen: but I'm sorry. But so when you hire you you don't care about what kind of degree they have whether they are like a doctor or scientist or you know economist or I mean how do you

Dylan Field: I mean look we've had uh one of our first data science hires for example he came out of a chem chemistry PhD.

Nicolola Tangen: So what do you look for then? So

Dylan Field: we look for the skill

Dylan Field: right? And uh one indicator of that skill can be formal education,

Dylan Field: but also projects you've done, job experiences you've had, uh the way that you spend your time. These are all things that also indicate. And I think what's most important and something that I'm always pushing for at Figma is how do we find the people that are showing tremendous slope?

Dylan Field: They're improving at a rapid rate. And if you extrapolate out, uh yes, it's high beta. There's some risk involved. you don't know if they're going to be A++ or actually they are really junior and this is this is the ceiling.

Nicolola Tangen: How do you assess how do you assess slope?

Dylan Field: I just talk to people about their backgrounds, their history, how they've approached different decisions in life

Dylan Field: and understand what it is that they value and how they've pushed themselves to grow.

Dylan Field: Uh, and I think that the decisions people make historically and the consistency of that tells you a lot about uh, their growth mindset and the way that they like to level up

Dylan Field: and how they challenge themselves.

Dylan Field: So, I always want people with a growth mindset because we're always growing at Figma. We're always encountering new problems. We need people that are adaptable.

Dylan Field: And, uh, I think that, yeah, it's it's unfortunately such a bias on the human side. This is for all humans to really look at somebody as a point in time and it's just not a very helpful framework. Instead, you want to think about, okay, where have they been and where are they going? And also, if you meet someone two years after you met them the first time, it's another bias to think back and go, okay, my first impression, that is who they are in my mind, and they're always going to be that way. You really need to be able to update. I've certainly been guilty of that uh and missed the opportunity to work with people that I would have loved to work with uh because I didn't update fast enough.

Dylan Field: So, I think that's something I'm hyper aware of too is just making sure that you really do update your priors there.

Nicolola Tangen: Let's um if we just move back to uh to the moment when you dropped out of uh Brown. So, you you applied for this um the fellowship, right?

Nicolola Tangen: I think you wrote in your application that you hated chocolate. So you're quite famous for

Nicolola Tangen: one of the most famous chocolate haters uh in the United States.

Dylan Field: There are several of us

Nicolola Tangen: now. Um how did you have the conviction of dropping out of college at age 20?

Dylan Field: You know I didn't. Um I had conviction that I needed to go explore design

Dylan Field: and so I had signed up to go work at Flipboard a second time. first time I was a software engineering intern and doing some data science work and recommendation engines machine learning very basic machine learning let me be clear uh and then they were willing to have me back and have me on the design team I had really no formal design background so I didn't really know why they were open to it but I was uh I didn't want to you know say no it was a gift and the chance to work with them for six months I thought this will inform my studies maybe I'll take more classes at Risy which is across the street from Brown

Dylan Field: and uh perhaps this will help me inform where I want to go with the year and a half left.

Nicolola Tangen: So is the college the premier design school in America, right?

Dylan Field: It's an incredible

Nicolola Tangen: incredible place.

Dylan Field: And I wanted to just make sure I was informing my studies right. And so I decided I'll take a semester off from Brown. I'll graduate, you know, instead of 2013 2013.5. And uh at the same time, right before I was about to leave Brown, I started talking with Evan, who later became my co-founder. and he was the smartest person I'd ever encountered. And I had worked with some incredible people in my internships. People that have gone on to start, you know, publicly traded companies that were then engineers who had run in the office, run into the office at 2 am jarraps, for example. That's who I'm thinking of there, uh, LinkedIn. And I met, you know, people that had, uh, done things like created Java, the programming language. And, uh, at, you know, 22, 23 years of age, Evan was up there. Mhm.

Dylan Field: Uh he has genius level talent and insight. And I thought, okay, if there's a chance to work with Evan, I will learn more from that than from anything else I can do in my life. This would be the most unique opportunity I could ever have. And so I asked him, would you ever want to think about starting a company? And I was very surprised that he was interested. And from there, uh we started to explore. And I didn't know if it would converge, but I applied for the tail fellowship just in case. And then as we started to, you know, every weekend talk about ideas, prototype things, pretty quickly I was like, "Okay, well, whether or not we get the Teal Fellowship, let's go do this.

Dylan Field: I have a little bit of savings. You know, maybe we're going to live on ramen and live in a bad apartment, but like we'll make it happen." And then with the Teal Fellowship and the ability to actually have that support, 100K over two years, that made it a nice apartment with uh Whole Foods.

Nicolola Tangen: So just uh to fill in here for people who don't know the the partnership is it's made by Peter the right who's the venture capitalist. Tell me what's the fellowship about?

Dylan Field: Yeah so the teal fellowship uh I think of it as a way to uh empower young people to make it so they can go explore ideas and get off of sort of the traditional tracked existence that many folks have earlier in life. And I've really started to frame it in my mind as more of a life accelerant than anything else. Uh I haven't done like a study of it, but I actually think that tail fells on average have uh they get married faster, they have kids faster. Uh you know, they end up in the place that they're going to go anyway, but just on a much quicker pace. So there are te fellows who they dropped out of undergrad, they worked on their own for two years and they actually went back to academia but like in a PhD program. They just never did the undergrad thing.

Nicolola Tangen: Uh there how many other now?

Dylan Field: Well, there's 20 per year. It's been going since 2011. Uh the I think

Nicolola Tangen: do you hang out together?

Dylan Field: Yeah, that was actually a critical part of the fellowship. Mhm.

Dylan Field: The social experience I had after uh leaving Brown was weird. Like I had my friends back home who were amazing. I grew up in Sonoma County, so it wasn't that far away from Palto where I was living a few hours away, but they were all on very different tracks trying to figure out their lives and they're all all their lives were going divergent directions. And I had my friends back at Brown, uh, mostly computer science friends, uh, some that were in the liberal arts as well and, uh, sciences, and they were all trying to figure out what's my job after college.

Nicolola Tangen: Mhm.

Dylan Field: I had my friends from Flipboard. They were all a decade older than me or more. Uh, and they had very different lives than I did.

Nicolola Tangen: And you were running a company.

Dylan Field: Yeah, I was running a company. And

Nicolola Tangen: 20 years old, 10 people. So, how did they

Dylan Field: Not even 10 then. I mean, it was uh, it was just me and Evan at the start. And you know it's it's existential at that point in time. It took us nine months of sort of existential looking into the void uh and you know really kind of absurdist thought to figure out what we were doing. We were trying to figure out you know which direction we go. We've got this hammer of WebGL. What's the nail? And we just kept trying things. And

Nicolola Tangen: so you spent you spent quite in retrospect you've said that you you spent four years building the product before you launched right?

Dylan Field: It was uh August 2012 we started we launched our closed beta December 2015 and the GA released in October 2016.

Dylan Field: Didn't start charging till summer 2017.

Dylan Field: Uh but yeah throughout that all

Nicolola Tangen: should have should you have launched earlier?

Dylan Field: Oh yeah of course.

Nicolola Tangen: And how well did you have anything to launch?

Dylan Field: Uh well we always had something uh the question was was it good enough?

Nicolola Tangen: And then you ask okay well how could we have moved faster and

Nicolola Tangen: and were you just a perfectionist? didn't want to launch until

Dylan Field: I'm definitely a perfectionist was an am I have to constantly check that bias. Uh but also I think that the uh the real thing we could to move faster is we should have hired faster

Dylan Field: and to hire faster I should have been more on top of the culture and I should have figured out how to manage people faster.

Dylan Field: I was a bad manager.

Nicolola Tangen: Okay. But did you have the capital to hire? Could you have hired?

Dylan Field: We did have the capital.

Nicolola Tangen: There's this thing called blit scaling, right? You you want to scale very fast. So just tell me how how were you thinking about speed at that stage?

Dylan Field: I was thinking about we got to get everything right. We got to make the perfect tires. We got to make the perfect product. I was too much in the mode of there's one solution to things. There's not. There's often many many solutions to things. It's rare that there's one solution. And I think I didn't fully appreciate it then. And also I think I lacked at the start of the company the rigor and discipline to every day many times a day be looking at that recruiting funnel and going okay who's in process where are they in process how am I going to get them to the next stage and I think that should have been my obsession instead I was obsessed with the product and I'm not saying that was a bad thing uh obviously I'm still obsessed with the product but

Nicolola Tangen: you were trying to be obsessed about growth

Nicolola Tangen: so you should have been spending time hiring rather than writing software

Dylan Field: uh I think I should have been doing both. I think the best founders figure out how to do it all and I think I allocated my time entirely towards the product.

Nicolola Tangen: What type of people were you hiring at the stage?

Dylan Field: Engineers, designers, uh, you know, ops roles. Uh, nothing that was too out there. But yeah, I think that um, in retrospect, we made some great hires during that time. But overall, if we had hired faster and if I had had the mindset I have now back then, we could have built it a lot quicker.

Nicolola Tangen: Can you can you hire a super people if you hire that super fast?

Dylan Field: Oh, yes. Uh but I think it requires uh a recruiting muscle that everyone in the company has to embrace. Everyone has to really be aligned and on the same page that we have to go find and ret get, you know, we have to go find and we have to go attract and then retain the best folks in the world.

Dylan Field: And there's a momentum to it. If you don't have the momentum, if you don't have the ability to uh really push and get that ball rolling, it just never quite starts. and it goes in instead in little sprints when you find one person and you really have to parallel path it.

Nicolola Tangen: And is it right that you started to charge because Microsoft told you that if you don't charge we can't buy because you're not going to survive. Is that right?

Dylan Field: Yes, it is the story.

Dylan Field: It was a surprise uh when I mean they're so nice about it. Uh the person that told me that is actually still at Microsoft and he's just a wonderful guy. Um, but yeah, they came to our office and they're like, "Hey, got a lot of people using your software. It's starting to be kind of important for us. What's your business model?" And I'm like, "Oh, well, we're going to figure it out." He said, "Yeah, uh, that makes sense. Why are you waiting?" Said, "Well, I, you know, I know the product's not good enough yet." Going back to perfectionism, uh, and I I just think it'll be spread faster if it's free. and they said, "Well, uh, if it's free, you could go out of business, and so we want to make sure you don't we cannot rely on software for critical operations is gonna could go out of business, so please charge money." And, uh, that was the point where I'm like, "Oh, I think we're really behind here." Came back to the team, we got to charge. We got to get pricing in order. And everyone's like, "Uh, yes, duh. We've been telling you this." So, you know, sometimes a little slow.

Nicolola Tangen: How do you think about product innovation and and launches? I mean, now you're launching loads of products, right? Yeah.

Nicolola Tangen: How do you think about which problems to solve?

Dylan Field: So the interesting thing about Figma is the Figma design tool at the core of it all. Uh made for designers, made for people creating digital software. And despite that, we see people doing so much more with it. We see people creating complex illustrations. We see people, you know, using it for whiteboarding, diagramming, brainstorming slides, uh, using it for production graphics, making websites, making really complex prototypes and more. And each time we start to see and notice and watch these use cases grow inside of Figma,

Dylan Field: we try to pull them out into their own product surfaces. The reason we do that is because otherwise if you're optimizing for a use case like slides for example and you make it so that you really build around it. Okay, well now Figma design needs presenter notes and it needs all this other slides functionality or if you're trying to do diagramming and whiteboarding there's a bunch of features you're going to need to pack in there and that makes the digital design product Figma design more complex. It makes it less approachable. But if you pull it out into its own space, then you can actually help it find its own life and its own point of view. So for example, Fig Jam is a product that we really lean into fun on.

Dylan Field: Fig Jam is a product that uh we explored all these ideas that we wanted to create to bring joy to folks. things like uh emoji reactions, cursor chat, stamps, stickers, uh as well as, you know, how can I set a timer during a brainstorm and have some music play, you know, all these little details that if we had started in Figma design for those, people would have said, you're getting in my way, stop.

Dylan Field: But instead in Fig Jam, you can wave your cursor around and it gives you a high five if you intersect with someone else,

Dylan Field: you know, and and it's just uh some of those things we later bring into Figma design, but having its own space to develop and to grow and find its own voice, that was really critical for Fig Jam. It's critical for many of the product.

Nicolola Tangen: Tell me how you're building kind of fun into the products.

Dylan Field: Yeah. Well,

Nicolola Tangen: because that's been a deliberate strategy, right?

Dylan Field: For Fig Jam, it's definitely been I don't think all of the products uh need to differentiate through fun, but for Fig Jam, that was our point of view and continues to be. And it really started with a one-day design sprint. Uh it's kind of wild that it was one day, but yeah, we're in COVID, everyone was remote. And it just felt like in order to get people to open up and to brainstorm, how do you do that? Well, fun, safety, psychological safety, that's important.

Dylan Field: And so, we really tried to lean into that aspect of it. And it was amazing. I mean, I think in one day we had a small team of designers generate 20 30 ideas, maybe five of them shipped. Uh several of them ended up, you know, being patented. Uh and all out of one day of brainstorming.

Dylan Field: Just what I think it's sometimes it's like if you can give clear direction and directive to a team, they can just do the most amazing things if you get out of their way.

Nicolola Tangen: And now you do dog fooding, right? You use your own tools to

Dylan Field: always have.

Nicolola Tangen: Yeah. use your own tools to create new products

Dylan Field: always.

Nicolola Tangen: How does that accelerate innovation?

Dylan Field: Yeah. Well, it doesn't until you get to the point where the product's good.

Dylan Field: But, uh, I'll give an example from the earliest days of Figma. I'll give you an example now. So, in the early days of Figma, uh, we dog fooded Figma design. And the only thing we did design with after we got to a certain point, which was quite early, was Figma design. And there were days where we broke the build and our poor designer said, "Okay, I'm going to go home early because y'all don't have a fix." And so, uh, that was rough and it very quickly became a culture of, "Okay, we have to have quality. We can't just have the app crash. We can't make our designer so angry, uh, when we, you know, mess things up." And so, that really instilled right away a loop with the customer. The customer just happened to be on our team.

Dylan Field: moving forward today. I mean, Figma make for example or our dev modem MCP. Uh these are tools that really help us accelerate uh our work and our prototyping, our exploration of what we can do

Dylan Field: and that's not even to mention some of the stuff that we've got in the pipeline.

Nicolola Tangen: Now you mentioned that some of these was during COVID and so how did in a way how did co help you uh in designing products

Nicolola Tangen: because you were situated in all different types of places and in a way the whole concept is to tie people together, right?

Dylan Field: Yeah, it's interesting. you know, we were fully in person before COVID. I mean, I think there's one or two people that needed to go somewhere else in the team and they had had such context that we said, "Okay, fine." But, I mean, it was this very small part of the population.

Dylan Field: And then overnight, like everybody else, we found ourselves a remote team. We had heard for ages that Figma was great for remote work, but we never experienced it. And then suddenly we found out, oh yeah, it is. uh but yeah I don't think that from a business standpoint co either decelerated or accelerated us instead it was I think a we were already on a very strong trajectory at that point and uh that trajectory continued but certainly there were many other challenges uh that everyone else faced too but how do you create culture especially for new folks during co when we started uh I would do these breakfasts for new hires

Dylan Field: where we'd all have breakfast for an hour and we would just talk about different questions that were on people's minds. But then we started growing faster and suddenly I realized that if I were to uh do all the breakfast I needed to do with a group size I thought was right, I would be doing breakfast 5 days a week for the next, you know, whatever amount of time.

Dylan Field: And that's when unfortunately I had to stop that one.

Dylan Field: Uh so not everything survived scale, but that's not the reason to not do things. You should still do things even if they're not going to be the long-term solution.

Dylan Field: So uh we did lots of fun things together. For example, we made a musical during co remotely. Uh we have a thing called maker week at Figma where the entire company gets a week to make anything that can be beneficial to the company and this includes not just engineers, product designers, uh you know people in the you know sort of R&D function it's anyone that wants to participate and uh yeah we had a new hire who had come from a background of not just impeccable engineering but also uh you know being able to create musical scores and making musicals.

Dylan Field: That's one of their passions. And uh we also happen to have a Broadway star on the team.

Nicolola Tangen: Well, you were acting too when you were young.

Dylan Field: Oh, yeah. But I wasn't a Broadway star. We had a legitimately like amazing Broadway star who had the most amazing voice. Uh no, not not comparable. Um and uh and also a lot of other people that were just very excited about expressing and having fun together. And so that was what they did.

Dylan Field: And it's online. Uh you can decide whether it's awesome or cringe. Uh I think it's awesome for what it's worth.

Nicolola Tangen: Yeah. Cool. And then out comes Adobe and offers you $20 billion for the company.

Dylan Field: That's true.

Nicolola Tangen: I mean that's quite amazing. But then that it fell through. So how did it do to what did that do to the organization? You think there's a big check coming and then it ain't coming.

Dylan Field: Uh yeah I mean

Nicolola Tangen: how much did you own with the company by then?

Dylan Field: Uh I forget the exact ownership at that time. It's probably uh 10ish% or so.

Dylan Field: Yeah. I think that uh first of all, I mean it wasn't the first time they had come. It's all publicly disclosed. They are an amazing company and I think almost everyone at Figma has not just respect for them but also grew up using their tools.

Dylan Field: So yeah, we've we're big fans,

Dylan Field: but um yeah, they at the start of Figma, we really thought about them as a competitor. Uh we thought we were going to go be the creative tools company and design. It was such a small market for software design according to all the data we saw. I mean the Bureau of Labor Stics said there was 250,000 designers in the United States

Dylan Field: and based on that we thought okay this will be a start and then we'll expand out just so happened that market grew in a huge way

Dylan Field: that we had intuition it would grow like we talked about with the exponential rise of software and the value of design moving up the stack and uh the design being a differentiator but

Dylan Field: I don't think we truly appreciate how much and how fast it could grow and so we suddenly found ourselves elves in a world where we're really building out a platform for product design and development. Again, fit into our framework, eliminate the gap between imagination, reality. Well, part of that is making it so you can go from idea to a shipped digital product. But it wasn't competitive anymore with Adobe. There's a period of time where they tried, didn't work. They deprecated it uh and put on maintenance mode. So, to me, it was like, okay, we're big enough now where we could be absorbed. uh this is a very like wellthoughtout valuation and I think that the pitch uh I thought it was good about what we could do in the cont context of Adobe and also frankly you know I was looking around the corner at AI it was before chatbt but you could see that trend and where it might go and I uh I didn't know if it would onetenth or 10x our business or 100th or 100x our business I mean I I really couldn't tell. It was just so chaotic. And so I thought, okay, strengthen the numbers. And uh for all the reasons I mentioned and then some, let's do it. And uh yeah, the definitely thought that it would go through. It did not. Uh the team really I'm so proud of how they worked through that with with me. And you know it was a moment where we needed to continue accelerating whether we're going to be at Adobe or we're going to be independent. We had to keep our foot on the gas.

Nicolola Tangen: Mhm.

Dylan Field: And the team did that. The team operated excellently and coming out of it we were able to launch dev mode. Uh and then the next year four additional products and I think our pace of innovation our momentum has only increased from there.

Nicolola Tangen: And then you IPOed instead.

Dylan Field: That's correct.

Nicolola Tangen: Are you happy that you IPL?

Dylan Field: Yeah.

Dylan Field: Odd, odd question. Um,

Nicolola Tangen: no, because it's not odd because a lot of companies these days choose to be private.

Dylan Field: Well, look, I mean, I think that there are some companies in the world like SpaceX where they have every right to be private as long as they want to.

Nicolola Tangen: AI, Dropics, I mean, lots of them.

Dylan Field: Uh, I think Stripe and SpaceX are maybe a class of their own there. M

Dylan Field: and uh SpaceX in particular, yeah, they have no reason why they need to go public or uh if they want to stay private, they should be able to do that.

Dylan Field: Um not every company is a SpaceX and I think that we are an incredible company, but we're one that will eventually go public

Dylan Field: and the question is if you're going to go public one day, why not now?

Dylan Field: We were ready. Uh and I'm glad we did it.

Dylan Field: It forces a level of discipline of course but that's a discipline that I think we should have had anyway.

Nicolola Tangen: Now you are using your talent and your thinking um and your visions to invest in other in other uh kind of startups like drones, crypto uh and so on. What are the kind of things that you are um that you think is interesting?

Dylan Field: It's more a question of I don't find interesting. I can't think of anything. uh the um yeah I'm pretty curious about the world in general and uh

Dylan Field: uh whether it be anything from you know certain uh parts of the software market to uh hardware to uh the life sciences. Um

Nicolola Tangen: but I mean you can't invest in everything. So where do you choose to invest?

Dylan Field: Well look my time is very limited. So my focus is on Figma and I spend sort of uh I don't know basically all my waking hours on Figma. And so then something that I invest in has to be so exciting or be so helpful for the world and economically viable that because I think those two go together. If you are economically viable and helpful then you can be more helpful. and scales uh that it has to keep me up at night uh because I'm literally going to trade off sleep in order to go evaluate and dive into an investment.

Dylan Field: Uh and if that is true, then my curiosity is so peaked, then yeah, I'll dive in and spend time and understand the company and then I have the additional test of do I want to keep spending that time?

Dylan Field: And if it's so exciting to work with that founder because they're so incredible,

Dylan Field: that's when I make an investment.

Nicolola Tangen: Let's um talk a bit about culture. So, how do you think your leadership style has changed from when you started until now?

Dylan Field: I'm not sure my leadership style has changed so much. I think the way that I lead has certainly evolved. Uh I think that the same lessons I'm learning now are the same lessons I've learned in the past.

Dylan Field: Uh for example, I'm always learning that I need to unpack my context and give more of my thinking and articulate more of my thinking

Dylan Field: to explain why. Yeah, it's like the um you know, you're doing math homework and you show the answer. Well, the teacher wants you to show your work. And uh

Nicolola Tangen: why is that important? Why is that important?

Dylan Field: Well, I think it's really important that people in the company have frameworks and they understand your reasoning for things

Dylan Field: because if they don't, then they cannot replicate your point of view when you're out of the room.

Dylan Field: And if you don't elevate it to that level, they also cannot debate it properly.

Nicolola Tangen: Takes more time.

Dylan Field: Yes. But also you get to better thinking.

Dylan Field: Uh even writing down something helps you think through it. And whether it's writing it down or it's a in-depth debate that then gets memorialized somewhere, I think it's really helpful in terms of scaling your thinking and your thought processes to the team. So that's something I've continued to learn.

Dylan Field: Uh I think I've also continued to learn uh that it's so important to empower and you hire these incredible people. Well, you both want to put them on the right path and make sure they have the right constraints going back to the previous topic, but also it's super important that you get out of their way.

Nicolola Tangen: Well, it's it's but it's difficult for perfectionists to empower and get out of the way, right?

Dylan Field: That's attention,

Dylan Field: right? And how do you do that? Well, I try my best to give good feedback uh and identify when something is truly a one-way door decision where it's irreversible or it will at least be very costly. And then if it's going to be a decision that uh I think we will really regret living with then I will push back and I'll push back hard if needed. But in general uh I more try to give good feedback.

Dylan Field: uh if I think that it's not being heard or actioned on that's different.

Dylan Field: Uh you know uh if we all agree on something and we don't do it you know and we're not improving the quality of something then that's a different problem on process.

Nicolola Tangen: So when you say oneway door that's a decision that's been made and which you can't reverse.

Dylan Field: Uh it's a decision that maybe is not made. Maybe it's maybe it's made it doesn't matter about the state of the decision but rather the potential for it is that it irrevocably changes the organization or business in such a way or product that you cannot uh go back easily from it.

Dylan Field: You can't un ship it without you know a lot of time effort or cost.

Nicolola Tangen: Yeah. And then there are other decisions which it doesn't really matter because you can overest them.

Dylan Field: Yeah. I mean, there's plenty of things you can AB test, see if they work or not. And those are things that um, you know, you shouldn't waste your time on. And so, then it's about, okay, well, do I have folks on the team who are exercising and showing great judgment? And if you've got great judgment, then most time your batting average is pretty high. Everyone makes mistakes. Uh, if you're not making any mistakes, you're probably not being creative or exploring enough. So, I think that it's good to let people make mistakes and learn. Uh but if you're making like all mistakes, that's also bad,

Nicolola Tangen: of course. What are what are the non-negotiable cultural elements that you have kept as you've scaled from the two of you to 1,800 people?

Dylan Field: I I think that um a lot of it we're very lucky because

Dylan Field: by virtue of being Figma, we kind of put this bat signal in the sky of what we stand for. uh creative expression, craft, uh first principles thinking, systems orientation, and the people that resonate with that, they are attracted to Figma. And so our population that comes to us looking for a role, uh they really do share a lot of those traits. But another one that I would call out is humility. Another one that is even harder uh in terms of screening sometimes is self-awareness. Because if you're not self-aware and I give you feedback, uh it's not clear that you'll take it.

Dylan Field: And so that makes sort of feedback conversations where you need someone to, you know, change course a little bit very difficult. And I think if you are able to build a team of humble, self-aware people who care about craft, who have a growth mindset, who care about community, uh that is an incredible team.

Nicolola Tangen: One word that come up again and again when people talk about you is that you are kind a kind leader.

Dylan Field: I try to be uh why is it why okay my best stupid question. Why why is it important to be a kind leader?

Dylan Field: Look I mean I'm I'm Jewish but the sort of golden rule uh I think is a very good one. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Uh so that's just like a moral thing. The energy you put out into the world is the energy you'll receive back.

Dylan Field: uh whether that be because of your perception, your uh way that you frame the world and sort of your viewport into the motivations of others,

Dylan Field: but people match you. And if you want to create an environment that fosters creativity, then yes, I think you really need to create an environment that's supportive.

Dylan Field: And kindness is a big part of that. But it's also, I'll be clear, that kindness is not always saying the thing that feels nice or non-confrontational. Um, if I believe that uh you have something that you need to know, even if it's hard feedback, uh it's my duty to tell you.

Dylan Field: And if I don't, that's not kind because it's going to come up later and it's going to create an issue for you, for me, for both of us, and that could actually escalate.

Dylan Field: So, the kindest thing is to be extremely direct in my opinion and upfront make sure that people are communicating. And that's something I'm always pushing on is how to get people to be more direct with each other.

Nicolola Tangen: I think it's quite interesting because when you're young, kind is the opposite of cool.

Dylan Field: Oh, it is.

Nicolola Tangen: Well, kind of isn't. I mean, if you're in

Dylan Field: I was never I don't know, but

Nicolola Tangen: So, I mean, I was never cool either, but I mean, it's like the cool guys, they were not very kind, but when you get older, kind is the only thing that matters.

Dylan Field: Yeah. I I mean, look, like I think that there's uh all sorts of ways I can be more kind. And I certainly get intense sometimes. Uh, anyone on my team would probably tell you that, but that's always my goal is to deliver, you know, conversation, feedback, uh, and content with kindness and, um, to treat other with others with empathy

Dylan Field: and to understand where they're coming from. Because also if you don't actually have empathy for someone else and what they're what's happening in their life, then how can you effectively connect with them and actually understand where they're coming from and learn from them? Uh and I think that you can learn from everyone. So

Nicolola Tangen: you mentioned curiosity um a bit earlier. Um I think your father said somewhere that you are you were curious about everything.

Dylan Field: That sounds right. Uh I I uh

Nicolola Tangen: I think he even said that you were a bit weird when you were a child.

Dylan Field: Oh yeah, that that's definitely something he said. Uh I was a weird kid.

Nicolola Tangen: But weird is good. No,

Dylan Field: I think so.

Dylan Field: It was interesting actually. My dad uh he's passed and and I miss him dearly. But uh yeah, when I got the Teal Fellowship, his comment was, uh this is pretty cool. I thought this this whole thing was very uh very off, but now that I've actually seen all the finalists in one place, I I I get it. They're just as weird as you are.

Dylan Field: I'm like, "Thanks. Thanks, Dad." So,

Nicolola Tangen: is he the one you wanna kind of show? Is he the one you want to impress?

Dylan Field: Uh, you know, my dad was so loving and let me know so often as a kid, as a teen, when I had no reason for him to say this and as an adult that uh that he was proud. So I feel uh yeah I feel very very loved always have by him. Uh I'm very lucky to have a great family

Dylan Field: and uh very supportive family.

Nicolola Tangen: Yeah. No

Dylan Field: try to do the same in my life for the people I love as well.

Nicolola Tangen: Oh that's that's great. You were a child actor as we talked about. Uh do you think it's been important? You know, the the thing that I think I've drawn the most from the acting as a kid, and by the way, I acted until I was a teen, and then I got super awkward. So, that's where I capped out real fast. Uh, but you know, as an actor,

Dylan Field: uh, you go out for all these roles and I was doing theater, I was doing uh, you know, commercial work,

Dylan Field: uh, I was auditioning for movies. It's kind of the whole gamut. And I was singing, too. Terrible dancer there at the time. Uh, so only had two of the three, but you go out for all these roles and you're constantly rejected.

Dylan Field: And that was just normal. Like it didn't get to me at all. It was never like a me thing. It was a

Nicolola Tangen: Do you think that's you get your stamina from?

Dylan Field: Maybe. Uh, I think it helps. I mean, I just

Dylan Field: don't really have a fear of going up in front of people. I don't really have a fear of getting rejected.

Dylan Field: And so I I do have a fear of not trying. Uh, to me, that's more the framework. M

Dylan Field: like I don't want to look back and regret not trying something.

Dylan Field: So I think that maybe my brain is just a little bit different from others that way.

Nicolola Tangen: What do you read?

Dylan Field: Uh right now a lot of machine learning papers uh in the past uh literature, non-fiction, uh design books, blogs that I like but but right now papers.

Nicolola Tangen: What does your day what is your day look like?

Dylan Field: It is incredibly variable. Uh I wish it

Nicolola Tangen: when you wake up when do you wake up?

Dylan Field: Uh, somewhere between 4 and 8 am,

Nicolola Tangen: right? I see.

Dylan Field: So, just to show you the variability. That's a

Nicolola Tangen: big range.

Dylan Field: Yeah. Or I think I actually went to bed at last night at 4 a.m. because uh I was working on our ourh video for today's Gemini release. Uh, so if I'm a little tired, I'm sorry.

Nicolola Tangen: Well, that that does not come through at all.

Dylan Field: Trying to show you the variability is is extreme.

Nicolola Tangen: How do you relax?

Dylan Field: Uh, just talking to my wife is very relaxing. We just got a sauna. Uh, all right. That's good. That's good. So, that has honestly been the That's great.

Nicolola Tangen: Well, I'm not mentioning because it's Nordic. I'm mentioning it because it has been the most life-changing thing or purchase I've ever made in my life. And it's

Dylan Field: sas are wonderful.

Dylan Field: Yeah.

Dylan Field: Yeah. I mean, just like you sit there and your entire body relaxes. You feel so refreshed afterwards. So that uh and then I think also you know it's weird but um I find uh very odd prompting of LMS relaxing these days. So I uh dive really deep into like how do I get weird edge behavior jailbreaks and whatnot for LMS and uh that has been something that has relaxed me. I haven't been into a TV show for a long time though.

Nicolola Tangen: Last question. We got a lot of young listeners. What is your advice to young people?

Dylan Field: Well, I think that uh if you're young right now, you probably see a lot of problems in the world, a lot of things that could be improved. And I think that it's really important to feel the agency to take a design mindset to think from a system standpoint, learn as much as you can, be curious, identify your passion, and then identify how that passion can connect to actually helping improve the world in some way. And I think that requires optimism.

Dylan Field: And uh optimism is a choice. You can choose to be optimistic. You can also choose not to be. But if you choose to be optimistic, then you actually can go and try and uh adjust or make a difference uh for your society, for your local community, for the global world. And that doesn't mean that you don't have to be cynical or skeptical. The two can coexist. because I think that uh some folks that have a optimistic point of view are also running a subprocess of okay what are all the ways they can go wrong so I can fix them

Dylan Field: uh but you still have to have that element of optimism and that's a choice

Dylan Field: so choose optimism

Nicolola Tangen: that's a good plan well you for sure have the combination of a growth mindset and uh curiosity and passion it's been tremendous uh speaking with you thank you so much you thank you for having