Figma CTO Kris Rasmussen on building real-time multiplayer from day one and the culture that made it possible

Summary

Figma's real-time multiplayer architecture was not a feature added after launch — it was the foundational design decision that defined the product. Kris Rasmussen, CTO, joined Figma roughly one month before its public launch, initially as a contractor for eight months, brought in specifically because his background spanned two rare disciplines: real-time collaboration infrastructure built at Asana, and low-level graphics programming developed through a personal side project — a WebGL-based surfing game engine.

The multiplayer-first approach required far more than plumbing in a technology layer. Every product feature had to be designed for eventual consistency from the start, ensuring that simultaneous edits from multiple users composed without conflict. Rasmussen argues this is effectively impossible to retrofit — the product logic itself has to be reasoned through a collaborative lens at the architecture stage, not bolted on post-launch.

WebGL gave Figma the ability to render custom graphics in the browser, bypassing the standard browser graphics stack. But the deeper technical bet was treating the design canvas as a real-time multiplayer engine rather than a static document editor. That framing shaped everything from cursor presence to comment threading — features that made Figma functionally serve as a virtual office for distributed teams during COVID-era remote work.

At Config 2025, Figma expanded from four to eight products in a single release cycle. Rasmussen was on parental leave for the first month of that push, returning to find the engineering team had shipped the full slate independently — a data point he frames as evidence of the cultural infrastructure rather than heroics.

On AI, Rasmussen positions it as an accelerant to Figma's existing mission rather than a strategic pivot. Figma Make is the primary vehicle, enabling users to move from prototype to production-ready code within the platform. The broader thesis is that AI lowers the floor for non-designers to participate meaningfully in the design process while preserving the precision tools — color pickers, component systems — that specialists still need for final-mile work.

Culturally, Rasmussen identifies role-blending as Figma's defining engineering trait: designers who write code, systems architects with strong product intuition. He attributes the original culture partly to the company's years of quiet, pre-launch development — a period Sarah Guo noted was burning approximately $800,000 per month before any public product existed. That pressure, sustained over years under Dylan Field, is framed as the crucible that produced a team oriented toward collective output rather than individual advancement.

Co-founder Evan Wallace's early technical contributions are cited as singular. Rasmussen notes that before joining Figma, he was independently studying Wallace's published tutorials on constructive solid geometry for his own game engine project — only later realizing the author and his future colleague were the same person.