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Dylan Field: Is AI Replacing Designers?, Design is the New Code & Democratizing Creativity

Use AI to start something, then take it apart with your own hands. Next time you're staring at a blank page, let an AI generate a first draft or rough design. Then go through it and mark everything that feels off. Fix those things yourself, one by one. Dylan Field argues that the blank canvas prob

40m

Summary published by , updated .

All-In Podcast

Key Takeaway

Use AI to start something, then take it apart with your own hands.

Next time you're staring at a blank page, let an AI generate a first draft or rough design. Then go through it and mark everything that feels off. Fix those things yourself, one by one.

Dylan Field argues that the blank canvas problem is real, but handing the whole job to AI means the result comes filtered through the model's distribution, not your vision. The back-and-forth is where your actual point of view gets expressed.

Episode Overview

What role does human creativity play when AI can generate code, design, and content on demand?

Dylan Field, CEO and co-founder of Figma, sat down for a candid conversation at an event in Yountville, covering the company's history, the blocked Adobe acquisition, and what he sees ahead for design and software.

The conversation covers three main areas:

  • The Figma story. Field describes starting the company in 2012, navigating 16 months of regulatory review after Adobe's $20 billion acquisition offer, and keeping the team focused through the uncertainty.
  • Design as differentiation. As AI lowers the cost of writing code, Field argues that design, brand, and point of view become the harder things to copy and therefore more valuable.
  • Human creativity in an AI era. Field distinguishes between using AI to think for you and using it to expand what you can attempt, and reflects on what it means when AI begins solving famous unsolved math problems.

Figma is a collaborative design platform used for product design, marketing, prototyping, and a range of other visual work.

Main Insights

1. Having a genuine point of view matters more when everyone can generate content

When any team can produce a polished deck or a working app in minutes, the output itself stops being the differentiator. Field argues that what rises above the noise is a real point of view, something distinct enough that it keeps generating attention over time.

He connects this to what the best artists, business leaders, and comedians share: a willingness to say something that is not consensus. Most people, he observes, are uncomfortable holding a position that sits outside what their peers already accept.

A useful question to sit with: Is the thing you are building or saying something you arrived at yourself, or is it the expected answer?

2. Use AI to get past the blank page, then take over with your own hands

Field describes a specific workflow problem. If you have a clear vision and you ask AI to implement it, the result comes filtered through the model's own tendencies. You will not get exactly what you had in mind.

His suggestion is to treat AI output as a starting point to react against:

  • Generate something quickly to break the blank canvas problem.
  • Go through the result and mark what feels wrong.
  • Fix those things yourself.

The back-and-forth is where your actual vision gets expressed, not in the initial prompt. Figma is building tools around this idea, letting people move between AI generation and hands-on editing on the same canvas.

3. Specializing deeply on a target audience still protects software companies

Field pushes back on the idea that AI agents will simply replace SaaS tools across the board. His example is Cursor, which grew rapidly even while frontier labs were building competing products with their own models.

Cursor's advantage, in Field's reading, was obsessing over its specific users rather than trying to be broad. Knowing your audience and building precisely for them is something a general-purpose model cannot replicate out of the box.

Design tools make this concrete: the feel of a professional instrument takes years of user feedback to calibrate, and that accumulated fit does not transfer automatically to a newer tool.

4. AI is lowering the floor for making things, but humans are still raising the ceiling

A few years ago, Field predicted publicly that AI would raise the ceiling of what creators could achieve. He now says he was wrong about that.

AI has made production much more accessible. More people can make more things. But the ceiling, the most ambitious, original, and surprising work, is still being raised by people who choose to focus, take time, and try something no one else has tried.

This matters practically because the app store numbers show exponentially more apps but flat usage per person. More supply with the same attention means undifferentiated work gets ignored regardless of how cleanly it was produced.

5. Removing ambiguity quickly is often better for a team than protecting them from bad news

During the 16-month Adobe regulatory review, Figma employees had to hold two possible futures in their heads simultaneously. Field describes the mood at the all-hands where he announced the deal was dead as relief, because the uncertainty was gone, not because anyone was glad about the outcome.

He also gave people a direct off-ramp: anyone who had joined expecting an Adobe path and did not want the startup grind could leave with a few months of pay and no hard feelings, with the option to reapply after six months.

Clarity and an honest exit option kept the remaining team genuinely committed rather than quietly disengaged.

Notable Quotes

"The ceiling has stayed the same. AI is not raising the ceiling. Humans are raising the ceiling, though. The creatives, the designers out there, when they choose to focus, invest their time, and to be bold, and try to do something that no one else has ever done before, that's when we see the ceiling raised."

Dylan Field

"Design is the new code. It's the layer above. You have to make it so that your design is differentiated and you have to have a point of view and a good brand and marketing."

Dylan Field

"I just hope that people use AI to create good and to go be a force for it rather than just joining the hive mind."

Dylan Field

"I don't think it's wrong to mourn the loss of a little mystery."

Dylan Field

Action Items

Suggested exercises inspired by the conversation.

  • 1
    Use AI as a starting point, then edit deliberately

    The next time you have a design, writing, or planning task:

    1. Generate a first draft with an AI tool.
    2. Read through it and mark every element that does not match your actual intention.
    3. Fix those elements yourself, one at a time.

    The goal is to notice where the AI's defaults diverge from your own vision, and to practice expressing that difference through hands-on editing.

  • 2
    Label AI-assisted work transparently

    Field described a simple internal Figma policy: anything written with AI assistance gets a note at the top saying so.

    • Try this for one week in your own work, emails, documents, or presentations.
    • Notice whether it changes how carefully you review before sending.

    The purpose is to maintain a baseline of trust with colleagues and to stay honest with yourself about where your own thinking ends and the model's begins.

  • 3
    Identify the actual point of view behind your work

    Pick a project you are currently working on, a product, a pitch, a piece of writing.

    Ask yourself:

    • What is the specific position here that someone else might disagree with?
    • Is this something I arrived at myself, or is it the expected answer in my field?
    • If I removed the parts that could have been generated, what is left?

    This is not about being contrarian. It is about locating what is genuinely yours in the work.

  • 4
    Give your team a clear off-ramp during major transitions

    If your organization is going through a significant change in direction, consider offering people an honest exit option with clear terms rather than waiting to see who quietly disengages.

    Field's version included a few months of pay, no stigma, and a defined window to reapply.

    • Decide in advance what fair terms look like for your situation.
    • Communicate the path forward plainly and let people choose.

    The point is that voluntary, informed commitment is more durable than commitment made by default.

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Full Transcript

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Dylan Field, welcome to the All In interview. Thank you. Thanks for having me. We are here in beautiful Napa, Yountville, California. Yeah, you're three drinks in. We're a couple drinks in and we decided to go on camera. Yeah, why not? Why not? Well, what are you doing here? As your wealth grows, have you noticed how much more complex things get? Between investments, tax strategy, and estate planning, managing it all is a full-time job you didn't ask for. Creative planning can help. Their coordinated team of investment managers, CPAs, and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting so you don't have to. Creative planning, where wealth works together. Go to creativeplanning.com slash all in. I was for this event that you're going to be at tomorrow as well. I'm at an event tomorrow. Same event. And we were basically talking about design, product development. I stuck in a little bit of security. Thought that'd be nice. But overall, a lot about just like how product development is evolving. And my point of view, the thing you'd expect me to say too, is that design is the new code. And what's happening right now is as coding models get better, I'm not saying that you don't need engineers. We definitely need engineers at Figma. We love our engineers. But also the nature of programming is changing. And as it changes, the value is rising in terms of differentiation to the top. That's design. That's brand. It's marketing. It's point of view. It's being bold. And it's like the emotional reaction you're able to elicit. And I think that a lot of people are missing that. We also talked a lot about AI and just kind of like... Okay. So you did a thing on stage today. You talked with Nikesh. Sorry. I was recapping the interview here. Yeah. No, it's great. It's good. We can fast forward. But I want to back up. You're the CEO of Figma, publicly traded. Maybe you can just give the quick elevator pitch on Figma. And when did you start the business? Yeah, we started Figma back in August 2012. And the quick pitch is this is where we want to make it so that the best teams in the world can design and create and build the world's best software. We're also used for all sorts of stuff. So marketing, advertising, slides, whiteboarding, diagramming, you name it. If it's visual at all, someone's probably doing a Figma, even if it's not meant for that. People call it a design software. Is that a fair characterization? Or does it not capture the full spectrum of what the service is? No, I think that design is really our center and our core. And when I'm in a product review and talking with the team, we talk about designers. We talk about what they want. Design is also a term that's so interesting because there's 100 definitions of design. I think a lot about the definition of maybe creativity meets problem solving. But there's so many others you can find. And then also design can refer to everything from interior to industrial to product design to brand design and so on. And so people think about a lot of things when they think about design. Just to get caught up on the history of the business. You started in 2012. You raised some venture money. The business takes off. You're selling enterprise software. You're doing really well. And then Adobe offers to buy the business for $20 billion? Yeah, correct. Quite the fast forward. What year was that? It was a few years back now. I'm skipping through literally building the business. Yeah, you're like 10, 11 years in. No, I mean, we have always respected Adobe. Still do. And a generational incredible company that started everything from printing to making Photoshop what it is and the entire graphic design revolution. By the way, I was on Adobe Photoshop since 1990. I did graphic design. Wow, so you're pre-layers? Actually, you and I haven't talked about this. Were you pre-layers? Yes. So I did graphic design pre-layers as a kid on computers. I did it as a service for people in the neighborhood and small businesses and stuff. So cool. How did you get access to it? I was at my school. I was on a Macintosh. I got the first Mac original in 1984. I was always fascinated with graphic design. It was something I loved doing as literally a hobby. You and I actually never talked about this. Then I used Bryce 3D and all these early 3D tools. Then when Kai's Power Tools came out... Kai's Power Tools is really cool. It reinvented Adobe Photoshop. For me, it was this incredible expansion of creative potential and what you could do with Photoshop. So I've been a big Photoshop fan since the earliest days and a big user as a personal hobby. I made money on the side doing graphic design and stuff as a kid. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Photoshop, of course, is a product that is very mature and maybe beyond mature too in that it has so many different parts of it that have been added over the years, which I think is the nature of a lot of software. It gets more bloated over time if you're not careful. But there's just so much that's possible with it. And Adobe as a company has been very inventive. So I've always had respect since I was a kid too. Totally. And it felt like it was a time when we could join and not be totally absorbed. If we were smaller, I felt like maybe we would just kind of dissipate. And yeah, we signed the agreement. We said yes. Then various world governments decided that they didn't like it. Right. And like antitrust got involved and they blocked the deal. Yeah. I mean, antitrust is kind of like a broad way to refer to it. But you have the United States, European Union, CMA. And it's a very different vibe a few years ago than today. Adobe would be taking out a big competitor. They said a lot of things. But I think the most important part for us was that we just kept putting our foot in the gas. I mean, I thought it would be sort of... We would just go right through. And as soon as a month or two in, it was clear that was not the case. It kind of became, okay, we got to really power through as an organization here and ship and build the next stuff. Because if we don't power through and keep our foot on the gas, what's another side? We don't know what's another side. We got to make sure everything's fine, no matter what. So this is 2023. How many employees did you have? I want to say it was about 1,100, 1,200 after double check. Okay. So when I heard this story, I was fascinated by... And I think I saw you in 2024, March of 24. I don't know if you remember I mentioned this to you. But for me, the story of telling 1,200 employees of a startup, we have one of the most incredible exits in history. $20 billion exit of this company. And it's not going to happen. What was the all hands like when you get in front of everyone and you tell everyone, guys, this isn't going to happen? And how do you get everyone to realign on building a business and continuing forward when it feels like the floor... For some people may have felt like the floor fell out from under them. Well, I think you have to remember the length of the regulatory review, which definitely needs to be fixed somehow. Because if you're in a situation where it's actually anti-competitive, which I still don't believe the Adobe thing was for what it's worth. A lot of people on the internet probably would say it is, or at least they did back then. But I thought their arguments were poor. And they were fighting past battles, not looking at the future and what this all would become. And I say that not because I'm not... I'm stoked to be independent too. I'm stoked to be running Figma. That was the plan for Adobe was just to run Figma. Either way, running Figma, I'm happy. Independently, we do move fast. I'm grateful for that. But to go back to your question, it's like, we had 16 months of regulatory review. 16 months of regulatory review for any company is punishing. And in an actual anti-competitive situation, that could be very destructive for one of the parties or both. And I think Roomba is a great example, actually. Roomba was going to be acquired. Small deal. Yeah, it wasn't a crazy deal. But they want to punish Amazon. And so they did not let it go through. And because of that, Roomba went bankrupt. And the entire market at the time basically went to China. So from the United States standpoint, it made no sense. Right. Anyway, I go on tangent, but I do think it's an important point. And there's some policy stuff here that's like, when you go for the ideals, idealism doesn't always practically help America. But it's also an important point, which is almost all markets now are more expansive than they have been historically. And nearly anything that looks like, oh, it's the market. That's not actually the market. The market is AI, turns out. Yeah, I mean, exactly. This massive market and this deal is 1% and 0.2% of the market. It's like, do you define the market looking back at the history, which is the only logical way you do it as a regulator? Or do you do it as a technologist looking forward? And that could be very different in terms of how you think about markets, sizes. But in any case, the all hands, it was actually the first day of a winter break, which is pretty funny. So we had told everybody, okay, enjoy the holidays. We actually have way less traffic during the holidays because we're a work product. And that was a Friday. And then realize over the weekend, okay, this is going to come to a conclusion. And on Monday morning, I sent a message to everybody saying, hey, all hands at noon and dial in if you like. And here's what's going on. And here's the full sort of details. And so, first of all, so much of the company showed up. That was awesome just to see the turnout. First day of break, really. And secondly, I'd say just the mood was relief. Because it wasn't about relief of not Adobe. It was relief of not having ambiguity. To have ambiguity that long is really intense. And people have to have 2 worlds in their head. They're not exactly sure what the future holds. So that was the immediate mood. It was kind of like lighter. And then from there, yeah, I think that the question you asked is right. How do you make sure everyone's all in? And the way that we did it was we said, look, I just kind of put a video out into the company Slack and emailed everybody and said, hey, if you're tired after working really hard, if you're someone who joined during this period thinking you're going to go work at Adobe, and actually the startup thing is not for you, please know we're going to be working very hard, hustling hard. And no shame. We're still on good terms. If you want to leave, here's a few months pay. And you're welcome to just let us know. We'll make it super easy. And from there, 6 months before you can reapply. That's the only condition. After 6 months, you can reapply and we'll re-interview you. And it was a pretty small percentage of people that took us up on that. But overall, it was healthy. And some people actually ended up doing total career pivots in wild ways, went on different life paths. I think it's healthy for everyone. You continue to build the business. It grows. You go public. And I just want to fast forward to earlier this year. You guys announced a partnership with Anthropic, Claude Design. Not quite. We had been working with Anthropic as a partner. Anthropic separately announced Claude Design, yes. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that's right. But you had a connector with them that you announced earlier in the year. Yeah, we have an MCP. We are partnered with many companies. Then they announced Claude Design. Was that surprising to you when they did that? And how worried were you when they came out with Claude Design relative to what you guys were offering? Because the market looked at it and said, oh my god, Figma's dead. Claude is going to crush Figma. I mean, the nature of online discourse right now is we're so back, it's so over. And it's just a cycle, right? I mean, how many times have you been all over in the last month? Yes. Probably, you know, a bunch of times I don't even know about. Yes. And I think I was kind of used to that at that point. Right. Because when you kind of die so many times and then you're actually not dead, you kind of realize at some point maybe this is not the truth. Social media is actually not reality. But yeah, I was overall surprised at the way that kind of communication happened. And I think that, you know, look, everybody wants to do good, usually. I mean, there's some exceptions. But for the most part, that's what I assume for people. They want to win. They want to do good. And I think that organizations scaling really fast, Anthropic, are there any examples of organizations scaling that fast ever? Never. It can get very confused and mixed up internally. And due to that, weird stuff can happen. And I think that it's just the case that, yeah, we were on the other side of kind of like a weird bout of communication there. Did it affect your business? Oh, no. Like, not any degree that was like, you know, significant. I read your quarterly report after that announcement. You guys grew 48% year over year. And the business basically accelerated its growth. So I'm looking at that. And I'm, you know, this was when everyone had the SaaSpocalypse thesis in general. And I was a big subscriber to SaaSpocalypse. But I do think that there's a bunch of ways to distinguish SaaS companies, one of which I think is founder led. And I think that there's user experience that matters a lot, embedded user experience, and the ability to kind of build from there, especially if you know how to use AI to accelerate and reinvent your business as a founder, particularly, but your business accelerated. Yep. No, it's been continuing to do well. And I think... I think that, look, the hard part about model companies and product is like, what is the product? Is it the model? Is it the UI on top? Is it some hybrid of both? If it's a hybrid, how is it weighted? And in any case, you're talking about like an anthropic, an open AI, yeah, I mean, Gemini, like whether it's a harness for coding or it's a product like cloud design and she's mentioned, I think it's easy to mistake model progress for product progress. The reality is a tool like Figma, it has taken a very long time to build and a very long time to make sure that we get the workflows right for our users and we still have work to do. Our users will tell you that and we're always trying to make it better. So I think that like, it's sort of not surprising that it wasn't an instant hit or something when there's actually quite a lot of work on the just core user journey workflow side that you have to do to meet the needs of professionals. Now, they've made cloud design into a product that is broad. So it's trying to do a lot of things like you'll see like posters and stuff as well, like graphic design scenarios, I believe, when you go to their homepage and like maybe they'll do well in some areas and on others, like I'm not bullish or bearish on the product. I think it's just like hard to make good design tools for professionals. There's a lot of things to design and a lot of categories of design. The feel of it is like an instrument. You have to get the feel right. You have to get mechanics right. And we've stressed every detail of that and have had a lot of feedback over the years about what people like and don't like. It depends on where they're coming from. It depends on their task and sort of like what they're trying to overall do. And there's so many scenarios, but overall, I think that there are more modes for software than are implied by the SaaS apocalypse. And it's not like software as a category is binary, good or bad. There are plenty of other ways that you can make sure that you're able to sustain yourself long-term and you have a growing business long-term as a software company or app player company. And part of it is, yes, if you're as specialized as possible on a target audience and you know your audience and you're building for them, that is something that matters. And I think a great example of this is Cursor. Cursor, like by all means, should not have grown the way they did. You've got all these frontier labs that are chasing them with their own models before Cursor had a model of any kind. But yet, Cursor really obsessed over the user. They saw our own corners. They strategized. They made sure they're doing the right thing for the customer. And they've had an incredible success. And I think it's amazing. And I think it's an example that will be repeated across many different types of companies. SAS is not dead. Well, I think that it's not true that all SAS companies are fine. And it's also not true that all SAS companies are dead. Fair enough. ♪ I'm going all in ♪ Protecting nature is often labeled anti-growth. The Conservation Fund disagrees. They believe protecting land, wildlife, and outdoor access goes hand-in-hand with economic opportunity. For 40 years, they've moved with market speed to protect at-risk land while supporting local communities. With 9 million acres protected across all 50 states, the Conservation Fund is proving that they deliver lasting outcomes that benefit communities and nature. Learn more at conservationfund.org. ♪ I'm going all in ♪ In a world of AI, agentic AI, I have this capacity to prompt as a human and say, I wanna make something that looks like, feels like, and does X. And this magical technology takes off and does it. And I end up with a product. Sometimes the product is great. Sometimes the product sucks. But it's improving the ability for these tools to do that. Historically, I would have needed a product manager, a designer, a bunch of engineers to do the actual building of the product, whether it's a software product or a hardware product. Increasingly though, it seems like AI is doing more and more of those tools. Can you just give me your view on the future of human creativity in this era, this future era that we're waltzing into the singularity we're falling into? Where does human creativity play a role? And where do the gaps still need to be filled for taking human creativity to the realization moment? It's the case, I think, that we're lowering the floor with AI, making it so that all of the production, whether it's code or it's motion, video, design, whatever, you name it, if it's digital, you're lowering the floor to make it happen. Everyone can be part of that, and it's more democratized. Ironically, and I used to believe, even a few years ago I said it, our annual user conference config, I said, the ceiling will be raised by AI. You'll be able to do greater things than before. That was wrong. The ceiling has stayed the same. AI is not raising the ceiling. Humans are raising the ceiling, though. The creatives, the designers out there, when they choose to focus, invest their time, and to be bold, and try to do something that no one else has ever done before, that's when we see the ceiling raised. And at that point, it's a question of, do you care about being in the center distribution? Do you care about a mean or average result? Is that sufficient for your task? Or do you need something that shows that you care, that you took the time to actually go make this thing? Do you need to go and be beyond what is the minimum bar? And in the world of software design and product, I mean, we're seeing exponentially more software than ever before. It's exactly what you'd predict. The exponential continues. You'll get app store numbers are exactly that same exponential. And we're seeing that the usage and utilization of apps flat. So people are using just the same amount of apps, but the amount of apps that you can get, it's like bigger than ever and growing. And I think it just speaks to, okay, there's a need to differentiate yourself if you're building any kind of software. Well, how do you do that? It's not code, because anyone can create code now. That's not the hard part anymore. So my view is design is the new code. It's the layer above. You have to make it so that your design is differentiated and you have to have a point of view and a good brand and marketing. And the point of view, I think, is the part that is probably missed the most. That's the human part. It's not just the human part. It's also the part that humans are uncomfortable having. I think that folks are scared to say something that's not consensus. It's so true. This is what the greatest artists, the greatest business leaders, the greatest politicians have always demonstrated is the willingness to be brave, to say and do the things that no one else would say or do. And that's what changes the world. And I would also add comedians to the mix, too. Comedians. Comedians are underappreciated. I had Tony Hinchcliffe at our thing last year because he's one of the few guys that is willing to say and do things nowadays, in the cancel culture era. But comedians often speak truth in a way that people otherwise couldn't hear. That's right, willing to say things. It's not about political correctness. It's about, do you have a message that can rise above the noise and do so in a sustained way? Because look at social media right now. Every unique point of view, everything interesting, it gets diffused into the ether of social media instantly. And so unless you've got something that allows you to keep generating content and a message that is really evergreen, because it's so outside of the Overton window, you're not going to be able to actually break through and have any attention. And the attention economy is ruthless. Is this also what human creativity is? If you're not doing something that's never been done before, you're not creating something. You're mimicking something. You're copying something. You're Xeroxing something. But to do something new is to create. And newness requires doing things that have never been done before. Yeah, by definition. By definition. And therefore, you are operating outside of this distribution of training. It's not even about operating outside the mean of the distribution, which is where you start if you're just prompting without any kind of advanced scaffolding around it. But you're actually doing something that is breaking through, and it's unique. And I do think that will be rewarded by the market. Everyone's going to see it. I think it's even rewarded by the attention market of organizations. I'm already hearing from so many, like, oh, I got another deck made by AI today. Totally. And I don't even know if the person who made it, I don't know if they read it. Do they even know what's in their deck? And at Figma, we actually made it so that it was just a simple thing, where we said, hey, if you are using AI in your writing of any kind, just put at the top, written with AI. Very simple, very easy to follow. And people made jokes about it internally, but people do it. And it makes it so that we can all trust that when we see something, we know that it's been cared for enough that it's worth your time to process. And I think that we're going to see some bifurcation here around trust. And one way to get trust is to do something with your hands. The other point that's important is if you have a vision or if you have a point of view in your head of how something should be designed or look aesthetically or from an experiential standpoint, I think it's great to start with building with AI. It gives you something to get past, the blank page, blank canvas problem. You can then react to it and say, here are all the things I don't like. I'm going to go fix these things. I'm going to change them up. Because it's really helpful to have a back and forth. But if you have your own vision and you're trusting AI to implement it, you're doing it through the lens of AI. And AI has its own distribution. The model fit by it, yeah. Yeah, and so you're not going to get exactly what you want. Now, if you're able to do both, and that's what we're trying to enable in Figma, make code of material on the canvas, make it so that you can go start by building. You can build to think if you like. But also when you want to think and work with your hands, you can do that too. Right. And go back and forth rapidly. Right. I remember the early days of Photoshop just having been a user, avid user from the early days. People freaked out when layers happened and then they freaked out when all the filters came out and then when Kai's power tools came out and everyone was like, what's the role of the photographer anymore? It's like you're destroying the art of photography, the creativity of photography. But it unleashed a new era of creativity because now these new artists emerged that could use these filters and use these layering tools and capabilities to reimagine what's possible on a canvas. And it was basically a new toolkit. It doesn't mean that the old creatives mapped perfectly to the new creative system and tools, but there was an explosion in creativity and human potential that arose from this and we pushed boundaries in all sorts of ways. Feels like we might be entering that era again. I'm a big believer in that and I think that part of it is what I described about market dynamics. In order to get attention, in order to get engagement, in order to get people to care, you have to do something new. You have to actually be daring and try things that are bold. The resistance to change is real and there's a great thing you can Google, actually, per your point. Look up the mailing list for when layers was introduced. And it's like people going, this is the worst thing ever. And you can find it. If you Google, it's like on a mailing list that's publicly available and you can see all the reactions. Totally. But obviously it became the future. And I think that there's also still photographers in the world who are doing incredible work, but the bigger disruption, if we're gonna be real, it was the camera phone. That was what made it so that people stopped buying cameras that were dedicated to the task of photography because the best camera is the one that's on you. And started treating photography a different way with Instagram and their camera phone. So it transformed for a lot of people and I can't tell you if it's better or worse as a result, but there was change. There's one view on human creativity that human creativity is basically connecting dots in the unconscious that you've had seen or experienced all of these things in your life or in your set of inputs, sensory inputs. And from those inputs, you connect dots and then you extrapolate a forward view of things that hasn't perhaps been seen in the world before. Do you agree with that view on creativity? And is it distinct from actually what AI does? And again, I wanna go back to the uniqueness of the human in an AI era. Well, I think that one thing that happens with humans is they're always seeking novelty. Like our reward function is different than like an AI's, also our loss function. Like if I was to open this bottle of water and splash it all over you and you got mad at me, like you bet I'm not gonna do that again. But an AI like, you know, with RLE, like really tell it a bunch of times that no, you don't do that. Robot, stop kicking me. Yeah, well, and maybe that'll change with architectures over time. But like, overall, the brain is different than the current systems that we've made with AI. And I think that it's unknown. We don't know much about neuroscience overall. I'd love to get to the point where like, we all know more about neuroscience, but something is fundamentally different there when it comes to creativity. And I also think design is different than creativity. It's not just creativity, it's also problem solving. Like I mentioned earlier. And the combination of the two is, I just find it fascinating. Because you have a user, you're trying to solve their needs, you're trying to do so in a way that stands out as creative and it connects with them. And also, like, you have to connect to wider systems, the marketing brand, the culture, the business problems, and so on. And like, holding all that in your head at different levels of abstraction while trying to like, deliver a screen or a flow that like, from a search space standpoint can be a commentarial explosion is just pretty cool. It's pretty fascinating. I'm actually personally really excited about the idea of reinventing existing art form and media where AI can enable more dynamic generation where the creator steps up a level, sets a bunch of parameters, but doesn't actually necessarily render the final product. Sort of like in a video game, it's rendered on the fly with the user in front of it. But the creator, the creative team behind a video game, for example, is building all of the objects. They're building the storyline, they're building the narrative flow. And the realization of that is much more dynamic, but I feel like it's gonna find its way, it's gonna leech its way into many more different media. We have products around that too. Like in Figma Design, you can have generative tools and shaders where you can do very much that. We have a product called Weave. And Weave is basically a node-based system. You can connect model outputs into other inputs and such. And the whole idea is it's not bad to generate with AI, but you need a way to craft that clay. You need a way to mold it. And with Weave, people do the most amazing video and video work. And overall, just the outcomes that are achievable with it are incredible. So yeah, I think that if you've got the intention, if you actually care to do the work, you can always get to a better result. And people, you know, new model drops. There's like this AI psychosis moment that people are in for a few days. And it's like, I think also aided by algo feeds. The best results rise to the top. Everyone's like, this model is everything. And then a few days later, it's okay, okay. I know the kind of like main tropes of the model. And you adapt fast. Like the novelty is gone. It no longer is a thing that's kind of like rewarding you or firing off your dopamine system or whatever. And instead you're like, okay, well, yeah, it always does that thing. How do I move past it? And that seems to be the continued loop we're in, which is sort of fascinating because models keep getting so good when it comes to these formal domains. Math, cybersecurity, IQ points just stack and stack and stack. And then for creativity and for design, it's very incremental progress overall. Maybe that will change at some point, but I think the fact that these are non-verifiable domains has something to do with it. And it's probably the fact that maybe that is the human role in the AI toolkit, which is conceive, create, design, and let the AI do more of the work, but it gives you the ability to do much more work. Any art or media that you're particularly excited about or interested in that's kind of emerging right now? I find it fascinating when people do sort of like new AI experiments. For example, this is the media category. There was a designer artist type that made a webpage the other day, and it was like a letter to Figma, actually. So it caught my attention because I was getting the Figma hit on the algo feed. And every time you moved away from it and came back, it got slightly more degraded, and it was basically a comment on attention. I thought that was really cool. Oh, cool. That was a piece of art. I thought so, it was webpage. But I thought that the technique and the way that they went about it was really neat and not something that many others have done. I've seen a few other things like that, but overall I thought it was a very cool way to do it. It was also just a very well-written letter. I liked the letter too. But yeah, I see stuff like this. And back in the day, I remember seeing people do NFT art with AI when NFTs were a thing. So it was like 2019 or something like that. But the way they did it sometimes was really remarkable. I mean, Holly Herndon's work around taking her voice and making it so that her voice was something that people could use in an almost open source way, that was quite incredible and ahead of its time. And I think this sort of play between what is me, what is the collective, and what is it that is unique and ownable versus what is not is quite fascinating. I've always been fascinated by that intersection. Yeah, that's cool. Just as we wrap up, a lot of the commentary on AI that's negative is that it takes away human agency, human potential gets capped out. Can you just talk a little bit about your view on the potential of every human to be a creative, to be a designer, and how AI might perhaps magnify every person, not just the quote creatives where they're in some elite class of artists in some special building, but the ability for every human to create and the ability for every human to design and produce things in the world and where you sit with that right now? I think it's even broader. I think it's as a human in general, pre-AI, post-AI, you have a choice. Do you wanna consumer create? Do you wanna take the easy path? Or do you wanna climb the mountain? And what I'm seeing happen right now a lot is people are letting AI think for them, less at Figma, but more just in my interactions with the world. I just see a lot of this at the moment. And that's one path you can take. But the other one is actually use AI to further your understanding of the world, to learn, to do things you never would have dared to do before because they would have taken so much time to learn or it's so hard. And to really expand the potential ways that you can live as a human. That to me, the latter, is the interesting part. The former, why would I want something else to think for me? My entire life has been about figuring out how to think. And I don't know, I just hope that people use AI to create good and to go be a force for it rather than just joining the hive mind. Everyone can be a maker. Everyone can be a maker. Everyone can go do bold things. It's about willpower and it's about curiosity. And if you're curious and you're willing to do the work, I believe- Be brave and speak your truth. Yeah, exactly. And then I think that you can go do incredible things. We will probably see a vastly different setup in the future where things that we can't imagine are possible and things we take for granted are no longer in sort of the realm of what humans do every day. How exactly that will look, I don't think either of us can tell, but it is the case that both were under the precipice of great change and nothing hit home for me more than the math drop last night from OpenAI of 700 plus papers on all sorts of very famous problems. That was a show of something. I had a lot of emotions. I don't know how to process it. I thought it was the greatest day of discovery in human history. I mean, factually, yes. And also something about it was brilliant and exciting and something about it was kind of sad. And I don't know how to articulate the sadness, but it felt like we lost something and gained something at the same time. I don't know. I lift my head up and I look at the next frontier and I think that the frontiers are brighter and wider and more accessible than they've ever been. So I'm pretty excited. Oh, I'm excited too. And I think that the world will look amazing and I'm an optimist. I think there's gonna be a lot of challenges and we'll figure them out. How exactly and what the challenges will be in their full form, we have yet to see. But yeah, I do think that math is something that somehow has a quality of mystery to it, like an unsolved problem. Is this conjecture true or false? How? Why? Grappling with that mystery is something that is special. And I'm both excited for the progress and all the things it'll make possible. And also, I don't think it's wrong to mourn the loss of a little mystery. Fair enough. Dylan, this has been a great chat. Should we go have another drink? Sounds good. Let's do it. Thanks, man. Thanks. ♪ I'm going all in ♪ ♪ Ooh, ooh ♪ ♪ I'm going all in ♪