20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dylan Field is the Founder & CEO @ Figma, the company that helps teams create, test, and ship better designs from start to finish and is one of 2020's fastest-growing companies. To date, Dylan has raised over $132M with Figma from some of the best including Sequoia, a16z, Index, Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2Bn. Prior to founding Figma, Dylan enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Dylan made his way from an internship at O'Reilly Media and a Thiel Fellowship to founding Figma, one of the fastest-growing unicorns?

2.) How does Dylan feel about the future of education? What core questions do students need to ask before entering? How does Dylan assess the impact of the Thiel Fellowship today? Why does Dylan believe that everyone should be an intern? What did he take from that experience?

3.) How would Dylan describe his leadership style today? How has it changed over time? How did he get past micro-managing in the early days and learn to delegate? How does Dylan think about insecurity and vulnerability as a young leader today?

4.) What does Dylan foresee as the biggest challenges in Figma's transition from application to platform? How does Dylan evaluate the success of the Figma plugin ecosystem? How does Dylan think about the right cadence to roll out new products? How does Dylan think about catering to power users vs catering to the standard everyday user?

5.) What have been the most significant impacts of COVID for Figma? Why did Dylan choose to adopt a hybrid model for Figma in terms of working styles moving forward? What have been Dylan's biggest lessons of what it takes to attract the very best talent? What works? What does not?

Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode

Dylan’s Favourite Book: Snow Crash

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Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back. This is the 20-minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, following on from our episode last week with Hoppin,
0:05.2	I wanted to stay on the theme of interviewing the founders of the fastest growing companies in the world,
0:09.8	and one growing fast than ever before is Figma. And I'm so thrilled to welcome back to the hot seat,
0:14.6	Dylan Field, founder and CEO at Figma. The company that helps teams create, test and ship,
0:20.3	better designs from start to finish and
0:22.4	is one of 2020's fastest growing companies. To date, Dillon has raised over $132 million in financing
0:28.7	with Figma from some of the very best in the business, including Sequoia, Andreson, Index,
0:33.8	Greylock, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins, just to name a few. And Figma's latest round valued them at a reported $2 billion.
0:41.0	Prior to founding Figma, though, Dylan also enjoyed internships at Flipboard, LinkedIn and O'Reilly
0:45.7	Media.
0:46.3	And this schedule state was such a team effort, so I want to say huge thank you to Peter Levine,
0:50.8	Mamun Hamid, Andrew Reid, Dan Rose, Gokul Rajaram, and many more fantastic people
0:56.0	for some really, really great suggestions. I really do appreciate that. But before we move into
1:00.3	the show today, I want to take a moment to mention HelloSign, a great example of a company that
1:04.4	found success in building a product focused on user experience. HelloSign is an effortless
1:09.1	e-signature solution used by millions to
1:11.4	securely send and request legally valid digital signatures and agreements. They raised a total of
1:16.8	$16 million in funding and recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million.
1:22.9	Check out HelloSign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands of companies and founders who value fast,
1:29.8	secure and simple e-signatures. And speaking of beautiful products there, and honestly,
1:34.2	cutting the crap, there are a few products I truly could not live without and use 10 plus times
1:38.7	a day. Affinity, it's a home screen app for me. And not just me, it's the number one venture capital CRM, allowing you to manage deal flow
	...

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