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

I also didn't see a single crowd surfing event happen. and we can make it happen. Good to meet you. Good to meet you. Where should we start? But please introduce yourself for the stream. Let people know who you are. Yeah, I'm Chris Rasmmanson. I'm the CTO at Figma. Great.

Uh take us a little bit through your journey with the company. When did you join? What have you been working on? All that. It's amazing to have like a barely a two sentence, you know, intro that just tells everything you need to really know. Took a lot to get there.

Yeah, it's a lot easier now than it was in the beginning to to explain it. But no, yeah, I joined Figma through a roundabout means I actually started off as a contractor with the company. So um for the first 8 months I was just writing code helping to get the product launched publicly and then working from there.

Um I think the thing that stood out to me back then was just like how incredible the team was. It was this insanely high aptitude team. It was probably the first time in my career I felt old and yet I felt like everyone around me was just like some of the most gifted people I had a chance to work with.

And the thing that like really sold me on the company was just how much people were trying to lift each other up rather than compete with one another.

I think, you know, when you have these really fast growing startups, everyone's ambitious, everyone's hungry, and that's great, but I think it's really important to remember that, you know, you're not trying to drive towards an end state. You're trying to build something that's lasting.

Does that culture just come from like four years in the trenches not being like, you know, being a quiet company and kind of building in like this monastery almost is like the vibe that I get from like the early days.

And then you kind of carry that through as opposed to the first six months are insane and then you're like ups and downs.

Sarah Sarah Guo said that the company was leading up to the launch, the company was burning like $800,000 a month and didn't have a product really out in the wild, but I have to imagine you you were using were you guys how early were you able to dog food the product and like build that conviction that hey, we've actually built something really magical here.

Yeah. So I I I started working with Figma about a month before the public launch. So there was a lot of work that had already been done. Um I think there was a time when people thought that, you know, everything just had to take six months and if it took any longer, you know, it wasn't interesting.

But, you know, hard things take time. And I think it's a testament to the culture of the company and Dylan to really persevere and push through that time and bring something to the market that hadn't existed before.

So were you brought in for specific WebGL experience or was WebGL at the focus of what you did or was there were there other challenges because the the whole like the whole story gets kind of collapsed to like oh they just picked WebGL and like that was the key innovation but I'm sure there was a ton of other stuff going on.

Yeah. Yeah. WebJL was was the technology that enabled us to do graphics like custom graphics in the browser and bypass some of the traditional browser graphics stack. Um I think I was brought in cuz I had this really weird intersection of things that aligned with the company.

So I used to work at a company called Aauna and I built a lot of their real-time kind of real-time collaboration infrastructure. Um which relates to the multiplayer stuff that we've been working on at Figma. And then u funny enough I I had been taking a sobatical.

So the reason I got introduced to Figma is because I was working on a side project just a passion project. And in my case, it was writing a game engine to simulate surfing because I'm a surfer and I think I'm the only person stubborn enough to work on that long enough. You solving Navier strokes like that.

There was one there was one browser surfing game that I used to play as a kid cuz I'm a surfer, too. Uh but it's it's funny you bring up a sauna too because like as when I when I look back at like the real like start of my career, it was like I was quickly invited to a sauna and I felt like such an adult.

I was like, "Oh, look at me. I've got this, you know, very uh cutting edge, you know, pro uh project management tool. And then very quickly after that was invited to uh Figma and then ever since then, I've used the product every every single day. That's amazing. We're we're following the same path as it's great.

So yeah, what what else were the technical challenges going on to release? Yeah, I mean, so I mean, first off, it's just not easy. I think a lot of people like when they first looked at Figma back then, they're thinking, oh, a design tool, a single player tool.

But under the hood, Figma is this real-time multiplayer engine. to be multiplayer from day one. Yes. Because I think like the the opportunity back then and the opportunity still today is not just to make a designer more efficient and more effective.

It's also to bring the team closer together to enable the best ideas to surface to the front and to help them align and ship and execute those ideas.

And I was I was uh saying to Andrew right before you jumped on the uh for me Figma was a social product in the COVID times because I would jump on I'd open my laptop my my son would would go to bed. He was uh just like 6 months old or something like that.

I'd open up Figma and I'd see a couple other people on the team like in in the main like you know file that we had and I would just pop over their cursor and be like you know in the in the comments being like hey what's up I didn't realize you were up still. Yeah. Yeah.

And it it felt like a virtual office for the team at a time when there was like no there was not much social activity at all. Totally. Yeah. I I think it's really important to make work fun and to you know again it comes back to lifting each other up.

We're all trying to kind of surface ideas and put things out there and it's a lot more fun when you get to do it with your team. One of my favorite memories from the pandemic was actually this time when Slack went down. Um so Slack went down as like the middle of it.

It doesn't go down that much, but you remember when it goes down. You do remember when it goes down. We use it, too.

We're big fans of Slack, but um when it went down, um we found out that a bunch of people were actually recreating the Slack UI inside of Figma and then using our multiplayer functionality to chat on the canvas. It was just a super cool moment. That's wild. Yeah, that's wild.

Do you think that adding multiplayer features after launch would have been if you play out like the counterfactual? Would that have been much more technically challenging? You think you think it's like there's something this special about from day one this is baked in?

Yeah, I think there's there's two sides to this problem. So the first is just getting the base technology in place. That's one problem.

The other thing is actually rethinking all of the product features so that they are actually eventually consistent and you're not stepping on each other's toes and dealing with conflicts.

And so a big part of building, you know, collaborative multiplayer software is actually reasoning about how you design features so they compose elegantly when multiple people are doing things at the same time. And that's really hard to bolt on later.

Yeah, the thing the thing that makes it so powerful in in in my own words is if you have uh no matter how talented an individual like designer, engineer, product person, founder is, no matter how much of a visionary they are, no matter how capable they are, the whatever idea they initially have for something will be better once it has like the input of a group of people.

And so the the the the prehistoric uh era when design tools were built for like designers and like no one else would even have the file necessarily.

It's just so wild to think back because I think like every every great feature I've ever made, every great ad I've ever made, every great website was always like this combination of a bunch of smart people coming together and all contributing.

And then Figma makes it so that it's as simple of like even if you're not in the same room, right?

Like I I think about how much progress would have been lost if you didn't have something like Figma during co where if you were used to as a team working and like all working on the same you know feature and being able to be there in person uh it just made it so seamless to recreate that and actually build great things.

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. I I I think the other aspect of design that sometimes people mistake it for is they think it's just about building like a static mock or a single image. And I think the reality is like the best design products, people sweat the details all the way to production.

So you're not just thinking about, you know, how is it going to look in a few key states. You're thinking about how is that going to work? What's the system behind the design, you know, and how are you going to make it performant and efficient and how are you going to learn from that and keep iterating?

And so it's a really broad space and super excited to be playing in it. What was the leadup to config like?

you guys came out the gates with what four major new product areas it felt like and uh I remember Na uh gave me a little preview of what you guys were announcing and I was like really like four I imagine it was pretty stressful for you but you guys pulled it off. Yeah. No, we the team pulled it off to their credit.

It was incredible. Yeah, we went from like four to eight products all in one config, which is really cool. Um and it was even cooler because I was on rental leave for the first month before config.

I was just so stoked to come back from my my short little prince to leave and see that this team had just cranked everything out and and done such an incredible job. Yeah. Uh talk to me about AI.

Uh obviously there are AI enabled uh you know products but then I imagine that AI is starting to infuse both in the internal workflows and also the sub features within products that exist already.

And I'm I'm wondering how you think about organizational design, how you think about uh letting the existing team run with just adding on features and tools that leverage AI to setting up new teams and do you need a do you need a crack team that goes around and AI everything or is this just another tool in the tool chest that everyone can be pulling from regardless of where they sit in the org?

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a it's a good question and we've been we've been kind of sweating that question ourselves, but I think um it really comes back to what we've been doing all along for us.

So, at Figma, like when we started the goal was to make designers more efficient and give them superpowers, if you will, so they can do, you know, more and, you know, bring the best ideas to life and then also to enable them to collaborate more seamlessly and effortlessly with their team and and make that whole process more accessible to their team as well.

Um, and I think AI is just this incredible tailwind and accelerant to all of that right now.

Um it's like not hard to imagine the ways in which you know designers are using AI in the context of Figma for example with Figma bake to not just like uh you know build a prototype but actually breathe life into that prototype with prototyping and ship it all the way to production.

Um at the same time um you know all of these technologies are making the entire product suite that we have much more accessible to the people around them. And so you know people can come into Figma and they can prompt themselves um to get started but then they still have the full power of the Figma ecosystem.

So, you know, when when the prompting is no longer the most efficient way, they can just grab the mouse and, you know, grab that color wheel and find that perfect red color rather than trying to describe it. Yeah. The final touch. So, yeah, it's super exciting. Yeah. Last question.

I think we have someone else coming on in a second. Uh, talk about uh the the engineering culture.

Figma is so interesting because I think every I don't want to generalize too much, but it feels like everyone has some design chops or at least taste or or cares about design, but at the same time, you have those deep WebGL roots. It feels like there's some pretty serious hardcore technologists in the organization.

What's the blend? What is that like when those two orgs come together? Uh I imagine that you've spent a decade integrating those two disciplines. But culturally, uh what does it take to really succeed at the company? Yeah, I I think it takes like intellectual curiosity, right? That's what we seek out in our hires.

Like we're trying to find people who are just as passionate as we are about making things better. Um which really serves our customers, too, because that's exactly what we're trying to help them do.

Um, you know, I think that we have like these incredible designers who also know how to code and we have these incredible systems architects who have really really good product sense as well.

And I think it's this like kind of role blending that we've embraced as a culture and we're starting to see, you know, with AI breaking down some of the learning barriers between these functions, other companies embrace as well. Y last question.

Andrew Reed uh says that Evan Wallace had some crazy uh contributions to the codebase early on. Any any any standout highlights in your mind? Evan is just an incredibly gifted engineer.

And uh the thing I remember is actually even before I joined Figma, when I was working on my own little game engine, I was reading these articles online about how to do constructive solid geometry and and you know, all these mathematical things and I was reading these tutorials and then when I started working with Evan at Figma, he he's like I I went to his personal website and I realized the articles I was reading were written by him.

Like he's just he's he's a super gifted person. It's really really an honor to have worked with him. That's fantastic. Congratulations. Congratulations to everyone. an incredible journey to date and just getting started. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks so much for hopping on stream. Appreciate it. Congratulations.

See you soon.