- Figma just sold to Adobe for $20 billion.
It's a 10-year overnight success.
Here's Dylan Field, 10 years ago when he was 19.
- If you're an artist,
you can just sketch something out and draw it
and it's beautiful.
But if I sketch something out and I'm not an artist,
the idea loses a lot of its luster.
And creative tools like Photoshop or PhotoDesk
are very expensive,
and they're also very hard to use as well.
I mean, to train yourself to use Photoshop
is a very long, arduous process.
- Dylan went on to create Figma
which replaced Photoshop as the dominant design tool.
And that's what made this company so important
Adobe had to buy it.
And it didn't come for free.
Dylan and his team overcame 10,000 landmines,
a lot of which you will encounter if you start a company.
Today, were looking at just a few of those landmines
on that path, and how he overcame them.
Let's get started.
In 2011, version 1.0 of WebGL came out.
This was a new way for websites to draw and render graphics
inside a web browser.
And this is kind of common:
starting with some sort of technology.
Instagram started as experiments around new APIs.
HTML5 meets social locations sharing.
So that's actually one of the reasons
why Dylan and his co-founders started out
with what was a new platform that was yet unexploited.
- For context, I started Figma with my co-founder, Evan,
who is a total genius and much, much smarter than I am,
in August 2012.
And for the first, I don't know,
basically until like June 2013,
we were very much in more of an exploration mode,
and trying to figure out how do we,
what are we going to build,
and what makes sense from a business perspective.
And I think we knew we wanted to do WebGL,
something with WebGL,
which is a way to use the chip in your computer
in the browser.
We knew we wanted to probably do creative tools.
We knew we cared a lot about accessibility of tools,
and making it so that more people could use those tools.
We kind of agreed with a statement that Bret Victor made,
which is that if you can't use a tool
because it's too complex, it's a moral wrong.
- And it is today as it was 10 years ago.
As they say, "Go West, young person. Go West."
Go to the frontier. Explore as Dylan explored.
If in 2010 it was JavaScript and 2012 it was WebGL,
today you might find frontiers
in large language models like GPT-3,
Stable Diffusion, or others like it.
You might find it in ZK-STARKs or L2 blockchains.
You might find it in computer vision models
since computers can now see.
But technology's not really enough.
Dylan also knew he had to walk
in a particular useful direction; in his case,
design tools and hyper usable design tools.
They saw a need, not merely the technology itself,
out of new technology yet unexploited, not fully understood,
Will you find teams exploring and building.
And as physicists learned to understand the atom,
so too did they discover the periodic table of elements
in startups.
New elements are being discovered all the time,
Usually by engineers who are seeking the frontier
just like this.
What will your element be?
Now, the danger with seeking technology for its own sake
is that you accidentally work on something
that you realize just doesn't matter.
And we've seen this before time and again.
Meaningless products that don't solve real-world problems,
but seem adjacent to hot buzzwords
like real-time, AI, blockchain, or social.
The buzzwords exist for a reason,
but not every buzzword startup has a reason to exist.
In this case, Dylan and his co-founder
found themselves building a meme generator with WebGL.
- After like a week of working on this meme generator,
I remember looking at the mirror and just going:
"Holy shit. I dropped out of Brown for this?
What am I doing with my life?
Oh my God."
And then I walked out of the bathroom
after sharing at the mirror for a while
and just feeling really depressed.
And then an hour later my co-founder, Evan,
takes his headphones off,
and he's like, "Dylan, I just can't do this."
- Now, meme generators are certainly useful
for some people on the internet,
but this space was just not meaningful for Dylan and Evan.
Knowing yourself matters a lot.
Other people might find that space to be their life's work,
but if that's not yours,
you won't be able to recruit, build, and do what it takes
to create day in and day out.
And this is a big reason for any person
who wants to make something
that really stands the test of time.
The 10-year overnight success does not happen
If you and your co-founders can't see yourselves
spending a large chunk of your time,
perhaps the next decade,
perhaps the next couple of decades of your time
working towards that mission.
I remember back in 2008, 2009,
when I was working on my startup, Posterous,
I had reached a point
where I needed to switch into a people manager.
And I wish I could say at that moment I succeeded at that.
But in fact, I ran away from it and I just coded harder.
It was the wrong move for Posterous.
It was the wrong move for me.
And it's one of the reasons
why I think Posterous didn't make it
to the Promised Land the way Figma has.
Figuring out how to become a manager
is an impossibly hard situation,
because A: you might not want to,
and B: you might find that you suck at it initially.
In fact, that's the norm.
What's crazy is Dylan's journey as founder
almost ended because of this problem,
even before Figma launched.
- Leadership is a skill you're probably all aware of.
You're in clubs,
maybe you're in sports teams,
and you can experience leadership through those areas.
But I think it's very rare
before you get into professional settings
to really experience management as a skill.
And it's actually a very different skill from leadership:
they're related but they're different.
And management is a skill that you have to build,
just like any other skill.
And there's muscles and sort of different things
you have to figure out about it.
And a year into Figma, I was figuring out how to be a CEO.
I was figuring out what direction to take the product.
And I was also figuring out how to hire people.
But most of all I was trying to figure out
how to manage people, and it wasn't going so well.
I made some hires
that probably were not the right fit
in retrospect, culturally.
And I also wasn't empowering people enough.
When you hire smart people,
you got to give them a way to really contribute
and to blow you away,
and to do things that you would never think of.
And if you micromanage,
and if you give people all the sort of,
here's the recipe for what to do,
they're not going to appreciate that
if they're the right people to hire.
And between all that,
I think at the same time,
this is a few years in actually,
but at the same time my dad was actually dying of cancer.
And so there was a lot of emotional stress
that I was going through,
which I think exasperated things even further.
And at some point, there was a conversation
with basically my employees,
'cause there were so many things that were happening,
and I was like, "Let's just all get together
and talk about it."
And it turned out kind of bad.
People were really unhappy with me,
and it was a moment where they were like,
"Okay, you need to really get help to help make this work."
And eventually, we did.
We hired our first outside manager,
and I actually learned a lot from him.
But that was a moment where I was like,
"Oh God, it might all collapse at this point.
Like everyone might leave.
This might be the end."
And I think the other part of it
was that we hadn't launched yet too.
- Dylan went through it all.
Today he's at the top of the mountain.
But the most valuable lessons
were learned early in the journey at base camp,
where a lot of us are.
Every highly talented technical founder who starts,
who wants to stay in that CEO position for the long haul
will end up having to learn what Dylan learned:
how to be a manager.
And it's not something you can learn
without people who have been there.
Get an executive coach.
Hire great managers to work with you
to build systems and processes.
And if you're lucky, try to find investors
who actually have really helped in that way,
like Jen Wolf at Initialized.
A lot of founders might get hung up here.
Isn't process and management the opposite of moving fast?
But as the Navy SEALs say,
"Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."
Reducing chaos, helping your executive team
be as productive as possible,
all of these things make things smooth.
And only then can you create something for a billion people.
And don't forget, it'll still take 10 years or more,
just like what Dylan and his team had to go through.
Dylan and Figma showed us one very powerful path
towards how these things come together.
There are a thousand landmines before every founder,
and he navigated everyone to this incredible outcome.
What he saw was not unique to him.
Every founder will pass through these gates.
But what was unique
is that he did overcome every single one to get here.
All the world is changing with code, with technology,
the kind that you and your friends can build.
What will your line of code be?
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