Dylan Field
CEO of Figma, the collaborative design software company; participant in Founders Fund Mafia show.
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“Field: 'Comedians often like speak truth in a way that people otherwise couldn't hear.'”
Source→“Field: 'The math drop last night from OpenAI of 700-plus papers on all sorts of very famous problems.'”
Source→“Field: 'Roomba was going to be acquired... 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.'”
Source→“Field: 'We're seeing exponentially more software than ever before... You look at App Store numbers. The App Store numbers are exactly that same exponential. And we're seeing that the usage and utilization of apps [is] flat.'”
Source→“Field: '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... Cursor really obsessed over the user.'”
Source→“Field: 'As coding models get better, I'm not saying that you don't need 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.'”
Source→“Field: 'They're a generational, incredible company that like started everything from printing to making Photoshop what it is, and like the entire graphic design revolution.'”
Source→“Field: 'Holly Herndon's work around taking her voice and making it so that her voice was something that people could use in almost open source way, that was quite incredible and ahead of its time.'”
Source→“Field: 'Organizations scaling really fast... can get very confused and mixed up internally. And due to that, weird stuff can happen.'”
Source→“Before Figma's IPO, Dylan Field owned roughly 9% of the equity yet held just over half the voting power”
Source→“Lone Palm Labs / Retro...Raised $21M+ from Thrive Capital, Imaginary Ventures, and Figma CEO Dylan Field”
Source→“Neros Technologies, "a three-year-old startup...that builds autonomous attack drones, counter-drone interceptors, and multi-drone control systems for U.S. and allied militaries, raised a $250 million Series C round at a $2.5 billion post-money valuation."”
Source→“Dylan was clear our gross margins are going to be significantly impaired going forward because our agentic products are being used. It's not identical, but they took the hit, right?”
Source→“Figma traded down 20%, but they burned the tokens. Dylan was clear our gross margins are going to be significantly impaired going forward because our agentic products are being used. It's not identical, but they took the hit, right?”
Source→“We were talking about making the Figma of wire harness design. And this was two years ago when we wanted to digitize a lot of the inputs into our factory.”
Source→“Senra Systems just raised $65M Series B co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Interlagos, with participating investors including Dylan Field.”
Source→“Brinc...builds drones for police, fire, and other emergency-response agencies [raised] $125M led by Motorola Solutions...Dylan Field [participating as] an individual investor alongside Index Ventures”
Source→“Weekly active use of Figma's AI coding agent integration grew 5x in a single quarter.”
Source→“Tim O'Reilly would always talk about create more value than you capture. And I think that is extremely important... The definition of a platform is that you're creating even more value outside of the platform than you are from the platform itself.”
Source→“If you just use an LLM for everything and have it literally tell you how to go build a thing, how to go design a thing, you're going to get something that it wants to give you... people that are just like, yeah, design me the thing — you're going to get the average and it's not going to stand out.”
Source→“We have something called Figma Weave, for example, where you can take model outputs and you can pass them through a workflow and really steer it along the way. And that can get you closer to, I think, non-deterministic generative workflows that get closer to intent and are systematic.”
Source→“I met Dylan Field in the seed round... He was like, designers are going to do real time collaboration on stuff. And I was like, I don't know, man.”
Source→“Danielle Strachman: When Dylan was applying, we asked for SAT scores… He answered, 'this isn't important.'”
“He referenced a live dispute between the U.S. government and Anthropic over the Mythos/Fable jailbreak as a live example of this unresolved definitional problem”
“"When execution is cheap, design and creativity are the edge." — Dylan Field (posted publicly)”
“Figma's own numbers support this: revenue grew 46% YoY to $333M, net dollar retention hit 139% (highest in 2+ years), and paid customers grew 54% YoY to ~690,000.”
“I think there's a big difference between, I don't know, Figma and Workday. I think the chances that Dylan's going to figure something out are much higher, a lot higher.”
Source→“Panthalassa…builds autonomous ocean-based systems to generate wave power and run AI computing at sea, raised $140 million in a Series B round led by Peter Thiel, with John Doerr, TIME Ventures, SciFi Ventures…Founders Fund [and others] also piling on.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.