Dylan Field on Figma's 48% revenue growth, AI monetization, and why design is becoming the new moat

Speaker 1: you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows through business that lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have a very special guest next. He was he was caught photographed by some paparazzi. I saw it on Getty Images. I think we got the photographer in the studio. We got Dylan Field, the co founder and CEO Dylan, of how's it going?

Speaker 5: Good. How are you guys?

Speaker 1: I just can't get over the reaction to that image. First off, people love you. Thousands of likes. But also a lot of people saying like that's where he should be.

Speaker 2: I was like, yeah.

Speaker 5: Who would have imagined.

Speaker 1: Who would imagined. Anyway.

Speaker 2: At least you weren't at least you weren't in the South Of France Yeah. On earnings day.

Speaker 1: Locked in. So let's go through earnings. Revenues up at 48%. How is like, what's driving that? Unpack at a little bit deeper level the progress in the business, sort of your goals, your expectations, and then how things are progressing against those goals?

Speaker 5: Sure. I mean, it's it's been fun just to see the way that the team has progressed so much on all these different AI surfaces. This is our first full quarter of AI credit monetization. Still so much we can drive.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And, also, I think it's pretty exciting overall, the progress we're making and also what's ahead.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And I'd say that overall, I'd like to talk with customers right now. What I'm hearing a lot of is, you know, I when I started to hear the early ripples of, like, end of twenty twenty five even Yeah. From early adopter types, they'd already gotten

Speaker 4: through that point, like, the sort of, okay. We're trying to figure out how

Speaker 5: to change our workflows with AI. Yeah.

Speaker 4: And what does that mean in terms of the

Speaker 5: way that we use Figma? Yeah. And I'd say that for a lot of folks now, they're kind of on the other side of that, you know, today, more mass market. And, you know, the sort of commonality between the early adopters, you know, more mainstream is everyone kind of comes back to it they go, okay. Wow. There's a

Speaker 4: lot we gotta really drive with design. Design is more important than ever.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And they're doubling down on Figma as a result. Now there's so much more we have to do to really give them what they need. Yeah. And we're working all the time to go deliver that. But, yeah, overall, it's great to see people's commitment to the platform and how much they're pushing us to be better.

Speaker 1: Do you feel like your customer base has a philosophy of using AI as as as sort of this like helpful assistant? I just think about everyone has the critique when they see an AI system do something that they're not familiar with. They're like, that's incredible. I would never need a designer ever again or whatever. And then when it's their expertise, they're like, oh, clearly this is just like one layer of the help that I need to do. Like, I'll often do a whole bunch of deep research and then I'm in a Google Doc writing my own thing and I can't really ever get a model to output a real essay or something like that. It just doesn't work for me. And I imagine that the optimistic scenario for your customer base is something where they're using AI as a tool in the tool chest. But do you feel like that realization has occurred across the user base or are there still people that are wary? How are people grappling with understanding where AI is useful within Figma versus where they don't want AI?

Speaker 5: Well, I think it's worry is not the

Speaker 4: right word.

Speaker 5: I would say it's more that with any AI system, you know, any function, you have to kind of learn where it applies and where it's most useful.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: You know? And and just like you talked about deep research, like, you might not be using it for your entire process, but it could be a useful starting point.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And I think that you basically understand the tools, you understand how they apply to a domain, and you figure out, okay, which ones am I gonna use here, which ones will I use at a different time, and where? And I think that for us, we see very much like a power law distribution in terms of how people are using agent. And some folks are, like, really exploring what they can do with it and finding all these cool cases. Others, I'd say, are more, you know, to dip their toes in. And what our job is is, like, okay. Go look at what the power users are doing

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: And make sure that we're making it super easy to find those use cases where agent can add value and communicate that to the entire customer base so that they can pick and choose where they want to, you know, dive in and also go optimize cases where perhaps people want it to really work, and it's not working as well. Mhmm. Because there's those two. Mhmm. You know, capabilities are not just like flat and everything's perfect. You know, it's like some things are really working, some things we gotta get better at.

Speaker 2: Jordan? How clearly, like, customers understand Figma's current abilities and Figma's potential, you know, net new potential AI abilities and and and, you know, that whole thing. It feels like the the capital markets still don't understand Figma's opportunity. You guys are doing doing all the work, showing the acceleration, doing everything right, putting up numbers that are completely, like, just absolutely wild. Not a surprise to me knowing the history of the company. Mhmm. But but, yeah, doing doing basically everything right. How do you how are you thinking about, like, basically storytelling? Because it feels like right now people just think like, okay, energy, AI winner. Data center, AI winner. And it feels like for every company, I mean, look, Shopify has gone through this recently where people are like, okay, Shopify is gonna be a victim of Oh, of of AI. Right? And you look at the management team and and how locked in they are and you look how much how much customers love the product and how integrated they are into the long tail of of businesses and the enterprise and you're like, no. I was joking yesterday. It made no sense. But I was like, no. AI is is a victim of Shopify. Right? The the market is like kind of, you know, starting to realize like, this company has durable advantages and I feel like your management style has always been let results speak for let results speak for themself, right? And the results are speaking but maybe not loudly enough. I'm curious, you know, how you're how you're thinking about, you know, you're now managing this like, you're not just managing your cap table anymore. Yeah. 100 people or a few thousand people, you're managing like tons and tons of people that you don't even know.

Speaker 5: Totally. I think it's exactly correct that, overall, the market's trying to determine who are the AI losers, who are the AI winners, and they're really working through it live with the world. And, you know, I I mean, like, look. I think that there's very clear points of view I have around what does that look like, and I think a lot of companies will look back at this time and go, oh, man. Like, how do people think that they were AI losers and that they'd be destroyed or victims of AI, as you put it?

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 5: But at the same time, I think that, you know, we're in this in between period. People are trying to sort through it all. And, yeah, to your I do have the default reaction that you mentioned, which is I think that as we show the way that consumption takes off in the platform, the way that people are using these surfaces that are, you know, AI enabled on the platform, that is what will be the proof that the market will care about most. And that's how we will convince the market that we're an AI winner, which is data. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that that's very important.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We, the team here collectively got very into Suno recently.

Speaker 4: It's very good.

Speaker 2: And I was joking jokingly saying like music is solved. Of course, completely

Speaker 5: think he's

Speaker 4: gonna agree

Speaker 5: with it either, but

Speaker 1: I think it's very cool.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So joking, but early on you're making you try songs in different genres. And then I noticed recently that Suno just has an obsession with glass. Like if if you're using Suno to In

Speaker 1: the lyrics.

Speaker 2: Create lyrics. In the lyrics. Yeah. It's constantly referencing glass. Yeah. And it was just like this perfect telltale sign, the It was the sign of It's

Speaker 1: not this, it's that. Was the sign of slop.

Speaker 2: It was the load bearing Yeah. Yeah. The load of music or whatever. And now once I've heard it I'm like every output I'm like I'm gonna start putting like don't reference glass Yeah. In this song at all.

Speaker 1: You're playing

Speaker 2: black yeah. There's this problem and we've seen this all in design where a new model comes out. We're like, wow, this model is so good at design. And truly, it's like really good at one or two styles of design and then it can't really break out of that and like people are catching on to it and they're hating it in the same way. You saw

Speaker 1: don't like purple?

Speaker 2: No. You saw Jeff Dean yesterday. He leaves, you know, legendary run at a company, you know, maybe ever. You know, a top a top 10 run at a at a at a company of that size. And he comes out with a with a new website that looks like, you know, he he clearly just like one shot at, you know, they one shot at the website that you get. And he was facing Claude Slop allegations. And I feel like that is a problem.

Speaker 1: Guy, to be fair. Yeah. He was never really Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I totally It's fair that they don't they clearly don't value design. Yeah. At least that's that's my view as somebody that that fine But front I feel like the problem I I feel like Figma should have its own AI research organization just focused on this problem of like how do you actually help people get differentiated design using these tools? Because right now, like Yeah. Figma is a company that could attract the talent Mhmm. That has the, you know, massive revenue scale to be able to invest in this and also the the the the taste and the trust of designers. And so when I think about the organizations that I want working on that problem Mhmm. It's not some like, you know, new data labeling, you know, group that's just trying to flip, data to the labs. It's like I want a bunch

Speaker 1: of You're making it sound like it's a drug deal. You're like service

Speaker 2: Anyways, I want you to I want you to I know you're public now and you gotta focus on, you know Business. You know, real financial metrics. But I want you guys to invest like a bunch of money in this problem because I think you'll be able to figure out and I think the designers on the platform will

Speaker 1: Benefit.

Speaker 2: Will will massively benefit and and it would be a point of, yeah, meaningful differentiation.

Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, if I heard the and you you'll note and if you look at the Ariane's transcript, the q and a, we talked about first party models and

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: What we're doing there a little bit. Yeah. And I definitely think there's so much more to do when it comes to even aesthetic. Mhmm. And it's not just enough to go and be able to have a lot of different aesthetics that a model can tap into. And for what it's worth, the models, they can tap into these different aesthetics if you prompt them right, but or some of them can. But I think that overall, it's also a requirement to be able to get to not just great, but, like, really awesome with these different aesthetics that you're trying for. And it's not just aesthetic. You know, as you think about the UX and actually how different screens or interaction patterns connect, how you actually communicate data to a user, the more emotional qualities of a brand or product, Like, we're so far beyond or so far away from, rather, what people need to get to great design, and there's tons of opportunity there. And, also, I do think that ultimately, you know, great design will, for a long time, come from humans. I think that there'll be lots of good starting points that models provide, and I think that you will have to push them. The sort of more that we are, you know, experimenting, using these models, looking at the ways that you can train in general, I think that it's just amazing. Like, we're we're we have models that can now, you know, go tackle the hardest math problems. They're hacking out of their own sandboxes. Like, it gets pretty sci fi, and yet, like, they're pretty bad design. Yeah. You can add all these IQ points, and somehow that doesn't make you a good designer.

Speaker 4: Like Yeah.

Speaker 5: You know, there's something else that's needed. And so or or many other things that are needed. And I think in general, like, it's a wild opportunity right now as code is becoming more of a commodity. It's becoming more of this layer that you can mold and shape, and the value seems to be moving up the stack so much to design. And I don't think everyone's kind of, like, fully internalized this yet, but if everyone can just go and implement something, then what is really required is that you go and push design all the way with a bold point of view, and you really emphasize that in the software that you're building in the brand and the marketing that you're doing. And that is so required in order to create a great company right now or a great product or a great marketing and get distribution. And I I really think that there's gonna be an inversion. Everyone's kind of talking about code and coding models right now. We'll get to a point where it's actually design driven. You define the design layer, and then you push out from there to get to implementation.

Speaker 2: Well said.

Speaker 1: How do you think about design that's more intentionally bad? I'm thinking of this John Gruber article that's titled, Tmu is a comically bad app. And I think all of us have landed on these websites every once in a while. There's like a spinner that pops up and there's cookie pop ups and it's grabbing your email and it's the most offensive like boxing match of like trying to

Speaker 2: use when I first the first Tmu add I ever remembered was shop like a billionaire.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's like crazy To me that was

Speaker 2: such bad copy but in in hindsight it's like well I guess it was good.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Stuck with you and at the same time like there is the there is a design objective. The objective is like maximize conversion way over aesthetics or some sort of like, you know, design brand value. How do you think do do you think that that is something that's like more likely to be solved by AI than creating something elegant? Or is it the opposite and that's actually like harder? Or or what do you think of the shape of when there's someone who's facing a design challenge and clearly they're not trying to make it look good.

Speaker 5: Well, you gotta think about the audience first. Yeah. So like, you might not be the audience for TMU. Sure. Or, you know, as you go to these applications or things that don't follow conventional patterns I'm not saying that they're doing 10,000 pop ups and

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: It's just, like, obviously bad, but I am saying that there are aesthetics or there are UX treatments that are confusing, And sometimes they're actually intentional guardrails to, like, get you out. Yeah. So you're not the target audience.

Speaker 1: Oh, I

Speaker 5: think that Snapchat's a very good example of that. Like, you're not gonna go open up Snapchat and feel like it's just a native intuitive experience for you if you haven't seen someone else use it. Sure. Because you're not the audience.

Speaker 4: You

Speaker 5: know, teens and their friends, those are the people that they want using Snapchat. Interesting. And they don't want us using Snapchat. Yeah. So another example that I've always loved, and there's a great talk from config this year on, is the Brad album cover. You know? Yeah. I tweeted out when Brad Summer was going on. I'm like, hey. You know, is this a good design? Because I thought it was a provocative, fun question. Yeah. Especially because AI will never generate that.

Speaker 1: No way.

Speaker 5: Like, let's say we had, like, the perfect aesthetic

Speaker 4: Yeah. No way.

Speaker 5: Model. It's not gonna give you Brad's

Speaker 1: No.

Speaker 5: Album cover. You know, it breaks the rules.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And what was really cool with this talk that was at config, and I can link you later, you know, it's it basically goes into all of the process behind that cover

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And how they got there. And it's just a really, really well done talk, and I think it shows the level of intentionality that was brought and how much work was done to arrive at something so simple that breaks the rules just perfectly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you're thinking about expanding the the surface area of what Figma can do? Because there's a there's there's probably some sort of tension between someone can come in and develop a full site and then host it and then all of a sudden you're like a hyperscaler if they get traction and you're doing database hosting and domain name registration. And there's a lot of, like, it's an amazing workflow for someone to have an idea and be able to go and instantiate it with really tools that make it really simple, but then be able to go up and have this limitless canvas to like never leave the ecosystem as opposed to if you start with just a Gen AI image and then you're like, okay, now I got to port over. But how how do you think about deepening the capabilities of the surface area of the product?

Speaker 5: Well, I think that first and foremost, like, the way we see it right now is people are trying to differentiate with design. Yeah. Sort of the lines between creativity and software building and product building

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: Are dissolving and blurring. Mhmm. And this is a thesis we've had for a while, and think it's proving out in real time. I think that right now, we're going through this I called them axe the other day, a design golden era, the start of it at least. And I think that people are now just pushing the medium of software so much further than before. And so what does that mean in terms of what we gotta do for users to really support their needs? It's stuff like shaders, which we shipped at config. Yeah. And you can now make it so that you can use our agent to create shaders, and parametrically, they're defined Yep. And you can tweak them, and actually, they go with your layer. It's very cool. As well as Mochen. You know, we're investing continuing to invest heavily in Weave Yeah. Which is a great way to take model outputs and actually shape them through a workflow.

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 5: And you can use many different models and basically orchestrate them in order to get to a result and a workflow that you can then put many things through.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 5: And overall, I just think that the creativity people are going to bring to software is going to be increasing so much in the year ahead. Yeah. And so we really want to make sure we're meeting the market there and bringing capabilities that people have only dreamed about. And, yes, like, then you wanna go and you wanna push the code to production. You wanna, like, open the pull request.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 5: You wanna host it somewhere. A lot of our customers already know what they wanna do. Yeah. They already have a place they wanna go. And so the first order of bid is how do we support those workflows to make it just super simple to use what you're already using Yeah. If you've already got sort of that setup.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you think people do do you like this metaphor? I heard it from George Hotz first when he was critiquing vibe coding as saying that one prompt will get you like 98% of the way there and then you the like the vibe coding systems give you he said like it's like a casino roulette wheel or what's the one arm banded, the slot machine that you can pull and it charges you money for a chance to get the last 2% done. And that feels like what vibe designing is sometimes in these image gen workflows where you're like, wow. I am 99% of the way there. And then you'll spend three hours trying to like get that last little bit. And it's like if you just start with a system that has a harness around it that allows you to go and change the text deterministically, you can save a lot of that heartache of, okay, I I I fixed this little problem by changing the prompt, then I introduced a new problem and I'm playing whack a mole for hours.

Speaker 5: Totally. And I think that it also saves a lot of money if you can go between rapidly between design and code

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 5: And back. Yep. Because if you have, you know, non deterministic output and you're trying to continue to push towards something in your head and it's just not getting there for whatever reason Mhmm. Like, you wanna be able to give the explicit feedback

Speaker 4: Mhmm. And say this is what I want. Then go build that. Yeah. At some point, you do need to

Speaker 5: have that full creative control. Mhmm. And I think that, you know, it's not just the direct manipulation, the explicit Yeah. Deterministic control. It's also about how do you actually leverage, you know, the great exploration that you can do with design and not just get this tunnel vision. Because right now, there's almost this quiet surrender, as our our CPO, Yuki, put it the other day, where, you know, you're you're almost, like, giving up your own vision to AI in some cases.

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Speaker 5: Because as many times as people, you know, have that thing in their head they're trying to drive towards Yeah. They start talking with AI, and AI kinda convinces you in its own way of like, no. Just go this direction. This is kinda what I wanna do. And suddenly, you're like, just like feeding the AI prompts, continue, continue, And when

Speaker 1: you You're feeding the machine

Speaker 5: and it actually feeds on you. Control.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It happens. It happens.

Speaker 5: You surrender to the AI. It's like, you know, you can't just just you have to like bring your individuality Yeah. Bring your vision. And I think also explore because people get really attached to the direction they're pursuing. And that's just not, I think, the best way to go and get to the right result. I think overall, instead, you wanna survey many options and work with others.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Formula One drivers have been having to surrender to the AI Mhmm. Because they have these, like, models running on on the cars that are trying to make the cars more efficient and use power in the right places. Mhmm. And they're getting to the point where they're like, I don't even know if I'm a better driver than my teammate right now or it's just the the the the AI and and I think a lot of people are hitting that point of frustration.

Speaker 1: Last question. Promotions. Personnel changes. Trade deals. What's the latest in Figma world?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've just promoted our long time security leader Dev to be CSO.

Speaker 1: There's another. Right? Laura Dana?

Speaker 5: Laura Dana, our chief design officer is also Premier Inn Products. Nairi, chief officer is now CMO.

Speaker 1: And also Oh, there's another

Speaker 5: One more. You gotta get ready, man.

Speaker 1: What's going for that?

Speaker 5: Chris, our CTO, will become chief architect.

Speaker 4: Well, thank you so much

Speaker 1: for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress. Really appreciate breaking everything.

Speaker 2: Always great to catch up.

Speaker 4: And we'll talk to you guys.

Speaker 5: Thanks for having me, Russ.

Speaker 2: Appreciate making progress. Goodbye. Cheers.

Speaker 1: Nikesh Arora needs help. We have to swoop in and help Nikesh Arora. We got to dig in to what's going on. He wants to remain the current thing. He wants to be hot and we're going to help. We're going to figure out that in just a minute. There were a couple other posts that we need to get to before we wrap the show. Front Office Sports is reporting that a Peruvian soccer club put a thousand sponsors on one jersey. They call it the TBPN effect. Deportivo Municipal sold local sponsorships for roughly $60 each after relegation generating enough revenue to help overcome its financial crisis. So if you're if you you have a podcast and you just need to pay the bills, maybe maybe instead of the ticker, it's just every logo all around the screen except for your face. Right here? And then everything's a logo all around. That's the future.

Speaker 2: That's right, folks.

Speaker 1: That's the future.

Speaker 2: Well Looking forward to tomorrow. Yes. I love a Friday show. Yeah. Lots of timeline.

Speaker 1: It'll be it'll be great.

Speaker 2: And Let me

Speaker 1: tell you about Codex before we go. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Leave us five stars Right. In Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for newsletter tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 2: It's been

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