ETHSanFrancisco Fireside Chat with Dylan Field

foreign [Applause] [Music] I do want to get to the prizes but before that I want to bring on somebody special and we have a really interesting talk prepared for interview prepared for our next speaker I want to bring on Dylan field who is the CEO of figma figma if you don't already know is a design tool that is taken Silicon Valley by the storm it has fundamentally changed how we think about collaboration and just doing design at scale and we're going to talk about how do we make good products how do we think about building more consumer-friendly applications and all things web3 so please join me in welcoming Dylan field from figma on stage hey Dylan hi Karthik how's it going it's good I've been trying to get uh carti uh T to catch on it's not working yet Special K t well let's take what KT that works KT hey KT I'll go with KT that's my Starbucks name well there's a lot of things we want to talk about and I want to figure out how do we not figure I want to actually blend in a lot of things about good products and web3 but for a lot of the people that are not familiar in the audience I'd love to kind of learn about how you got into web 3 what got you excited and just kind of what background you have in this space and everything from that beginning yeah I mean slow Journey unfortunately uh I started getting emails about crypto uh gosh I mean even 2009 I was uh on a uh mailing list 2008 2009 about hash functions uh I think Zuko rather than mailing list about this Bitcoin thing it was a while ago uh and then um I I had this like lecture online about md5 and someone reached out and said hey there's this Bitcoin paper can you please read it and tell me what you think and I was just like these crazy people with their crazy internet money uh and then you know I was in the teal fellowship and uh vitalik famously was part of that uh he emailed the listserv and said hey can anyone please read my white paper no one replied um uh I lived with uh uh Juan from file coin for collabs uh he was my roommates he wrote the ipfs white paper on our table uh I still managed to ignore crypto uh but eventually I started dating my now wife her name is Elena notalinsky uh founder of iron fish um and and she uh you know was starting to get really excited about ethereum and that made me dive deep in the tour of 2017 time frame uh and I started getting really excited and started to learn the vocabulary more and I was like wow there's a whole world here and this is extremely exciting there's so much going on absolutely and Elena was that the very first youth Global event five years ago and that's how I know her and it's been absolutely incredible yeah she said uh we were we're actually with Juan and a bunch of protocol House people and uh we're they're all talking about ethereum they're like oh my God it might cross a hundred dollars uh and and she's like why were they all so excited and uh we went home that night on the ride home she starts just like frantically Googling everything ethereum and I said well there's this like thing uh you know in in uh you know um in Canada and like I think there's some people who are going to be there and uh it's just he went to eat Waterloo and ate Waterloo that was when crypto kitties came out uh at that first event and it ended up being a historic event in lots of ways absolutely um and that's how I know you too well so that was a lot on the theory on how you kind of got more and more into the space um what have you kind of done directly I know you've you're involved in a lot of nmt projects uh just as a collector and also kind of an advisor would love to kind of hear your background what what kind of gets you excited there yeah I mean so uh I was actually pretty thrilled because three of the six sponsors I'm like well I was an investor in those um and I I started to get really excited about start a 2017 time frame by the way I don't know how many of you um are uh have entered the ecosystem sort of in the last year versus the last three five ten years um it only takes one cycle to be an OG in crypto which is pretty cool uh and so um you know I started to invest in more projects um the I actually saw the project that probably um got me any street cred into space with scripture punks uh and I saw that in 2017 on uh on Reddit of all places it was like I had no special knowledge uh and I was like this is cool this seems like legit uh art pieces uh potentially uh for ethereum I got excited about this idea of a crypto collectible we didn't have the term nfts yet uh and started to dive into it um spent all my winter break that year in 2017 2018 just like basically learning about every crypto collectible project there was uh ended up buying this Punk 7804 it's more about that sure uh I bought it for fourteen thousand dollars in January 2018. uh at that time was absurd uh completely absurd I mean it was like 12 eighth uh eth was almost as high as it was today so peak of the Bubble at that time period And I remember turning to Elena um you know we're getting really serious I'm like is this the stupidest thing I've ever done and she's like probably but Dylan you won't shut up about it so please just do it and get over with it and we'll move on we can enjoy our vacation because I was just like basically talking uh Non-Stop about crypto punks for like a week um and she for what's worse she was talking about zero knowledge stuff for like a week she was going oh is there some way that you could like play Battleship on the blockchain without like both people knowing you know where their things are and those were interesting times so we had we had a fun conversations for sure and tell us how that story ends about 7804 so 7804 Oscar de Punk started gain steam uh I I ended up selling it um I miss it a lot somebody Anonymous on the internet bought it for 4 200 each so it was quite a increase uh which at that time was seven and a half million yeah it was the second highest day all the time that's right and then people beat it really fast um well that was about a year and a half ago uh how do you think about nfts now are you still excited about them are you still kind of thinking of them as just kind of Collectibles so that what gets you interested in in that category yeah so I think um nfts are a mixed bag uh I think that on one side there is real art that's happening in the nft space and I am uh I'm super excited about on chain art super excited about anything that's like the smart contract is part of the RPS um I've never really been a believer of you have some files somewhere on the internet and the URL is in a token and that's like an nft it just feels like not that Innovative to me uh I love seeing ours get paid so if people are artists and they're getting money from that all the power to them it's just not what I am that interested in myself uh I think over the last year as more people have gotten excited about that Mt space there's been more people coming into it uh that money also Drew people that were scamming people uh that were not respecting copyright um and I mean like in a zero way I mean like you know like I reply um and that those are some really disturbing things to see to be honest and so uh I I also started to see that like if you're somebody who had had success in nfts before there were a certain class of people who were watching your every move in your wallet and would basically um do some really shady stuff to hike up the prices of collections uh and so I started to be afraid of like Trading for a bit and um you know I think that nfts do have some characteristic as is crypto of the more people that enter a system the higher the price of a collection can go uh and the more people leave the lower it might go it's a little more nuanced than that but but that's that is the basic characteristic of flexible uh art is collectible as well and you know so I think overall I am excited about nfts I think that they're the future of media in a lot of ways probably uh and I think there's so much more to explore for nfts but I also am glad that the volume is going down a bit so we can get back to building and we can also make sure that we understand how to guard against these behaviors that are less constructive absolutely thanks for that and and I guess maybe one thing I wanted to see how you think about this is that over the last couple of months we've definitely seen a lot of generative art kind of come in uh Dolly gpg3 githubs Code Pilot mid-journey uh a lot more experiments that are just kind of making easier for us to kind of think about art that which is either not be possible or just is Way Beyond what we think is human capable uh do you think that sort of changes how we think about that entering in web 3 or just overall in this space how do you think that affects this ecosystem yeah I mean uh I I think first of all the idea of like an art Dao that's actually autonomous is really cool um if you had a sort of AI system uh that's emitting art in that art is then being sold uh and there's sort of something that's self-perpetuating truly without any human the loop I think that's a really cool idea um I I think that um the some of the general models are probably not that relevant to crypto right now unless you're using it uh to create more work um or maybe it helping in this way have our artists earn more money because this is fundamentally a way for them to also make some income from from their work yeah I I think that um if there was a way to for example Trace back to artists that are maybe part of the train data uh and somehow you know create a crypto scheme to make it so those artists are paid that could be really cool uh I think that there's probably a lot more the story to be written about AI art and crypto but I think it is kind of amusing that uh up until the recent major proof a stake you know we had sort of these like three warring camps uh we had crypto we had people that liked Ai and people like gaming and they're all like er we want gpus uh so I feel like it was kind of an adversarial relationship for a while but maybe starting to cool a little bit I think that's definitely happened with with proven stake in the last two months and uh I also think it perfectly coincides with all the the generative art kind of becoming popular because you just have thousands of gpus now all right enough about some of the web 3 themes that we're excited about let's kind of switch gears on thinking about making good products um kind of I'll keep this vague but kind of From perspective what what makes a good product or maybe a good consumer product well I think a good product is uh one that solves a problem uh something that is uh designed with empathy uh is straightforward and on the consumer side I think uh people have even less tolerance for that they really care if you're making a consumer product uh to have no friction and so I think for something like figma where sometimes it takes quite a while to ramp up as a new user uh we try to make it as simple as possible I think about a staircase metaphor where that first step should be very easy to take and over time you can gain Mastery as you progress up those stairs uh it doesn't matter before that I think Rasmus originally made but I think for Consumer it's like those steps have to be tiny at first uh otherwise it just never takes off and that's specifically for Consumer you mean or or just is it specifically for a consumer product or any product that you that you yeah I think you weren't the onboarding and the ease of use for any product to be really straightforward but I think for Consumer especially that's the case uh and if not trying to make it really easy to onboard into uh then you can't reach the The Kindergartners and their kindergarten teachers yeah the the classic if your mom can use it it's it's not mainstream yet um kind of on a similar theme I think a common criticism that web3 gets is that there's it's a solution looking for a problem or we're not really sure these are mass scale problems do you kind of how do you think about do you have any Frameworks for evaluating product Market fit or what do you think kind of constitutes to use this this is actually solving a problem or a need yeah I think that um there's a little bit too much emphasis sometimes in crypto on price going up right it makes sense because that's like the metric that everyone gets and it's really easy to keep track of um but at the end of the day if you're not solving a problem for someone it doesn't matter right and so I think that usage is undervalued in crypto and price is probably overvalued um and so I I hope to see uh more products that are really focused on making something that's useful for people and I think that we're starting to see that I think that people are really getting the message and I also think that this is a unique time where we have a chance to to hunker down when prices are deflated a bit uh and really focus on the building and making sure that we're solving core problems and uh I I'm really excited to see what's gonna come out of this period there there are 1700 people in this building um and we're going to see a few hundred of these things come out on Sunday so I I am sure we're going to see initial waves of what can happen so that's definitely going to be exciting uh maybe kind of going back in time a little bit I think when when you started figma uh it was fundamentally changing how people think about design uh collaborative on web was not really as a common kind of practice and you kind of had to figure this out over a few years how did you kind of think about those moments where you were not sure there's uncertainty on will people want this or you really believe this is how everything should work but people were really not sold uh how do you think about kind of balling through those moments or kind of how do you think about just powering through this and where do you get the will and what's a good way of thinking about this thing as Founders think about building companies yeah I think um you have to form a hypothesis of where you think the world's going you have to then uh validate that hypothesis as much as possible and the hard part is when you're trying to validate the hypothesis and the validation is not coming but you really believe it's true and I think that's like the the part that no one can teach for us what was that for figma yeah yeah for us like multiplayer editing was that way Webb was that way so we ask people do you want a design on the web and they're like huh uh you know do you want to work with multiple people like in a Google doc on designs and everyone basically said no uh they're like one or two people that we found that were interested in that but otherwise people thought this makes no sense but as we built it and we tried ourselves we saw There's real value and we also saw that it didn't work if you didn't have uh some way to actually have that multiplayer collaboration and so our own experience led us to believe this is very important and we went all in on it and I think it ended up being you know the main differentiator of figma and eventually people came around but there was some Faith there and I think that um if you have that faith if you feel that strongly and you can do that over a long period of time uh then sometimes there's rewards and sometimes you are ahead of the curve though and I think the hard part is knowing the timing sometimes you are far too early so we were talking about Dows earlier the sponsors you know Aragon uh and it's still going but I think um you know someone ahead of its time uh absolutely and and there's plenty of projects in crypto that are are similar um in terms of their started so early and it took a while for the rest of the ecosystem to catch up and go wow this is actually a problem that we need to solve right now uh I'm sure you could rattle off like 12. I'll stop here at least yes uh you know and um you know we'll remember those well we don't remember the ones that came too late right uh but it ends up being that like if you're just on time that's really important for figma we were on time because webgl was a new technology that existed uh with interaction webgl made it so we could actually build this in the browser use the GPU in the comp in the browser and make it very efficient whereas E4 people had to use flash it was too slow and you couldn't make a professional grade tool online at that time and I think the the thing to comment here is that um what you said is definitely true for the product side and I think we kind of already see this Behavior work really well in web 2 and web3 which is everything in the infrastructure side follows the same pattern like things must be I mean the webgl argument here like it had to be there for you to actually build something that would Delight the end user and sometimes these things take time or they're just not performant yet and we're kind of seeing that happen especially as we're going to see how the L2 ecosystem have evolved in web 3 and now somewhere stable coins and stable coins just kind of getting massive production markets I mean you name it there's so much that is evolving in ethereum ecosystem that's now these building blocks that are made possible and you can come to hackathon like ESF just and you can just go hacks two days of course before it was like not possible to build some of these things at all yeah and and that's a good measure of a growing developer platform because if things just become pluggable and and componentized that's when you get to a point where you just have to think about how something's going to work it just works and you build on the actual problem that you want to solve and I want I know you want to do it yourself so I'll brag for you um so much that is due to the work of the youth Global team so I think we can maybe give it around each Global team around a pause thank you and it's support of everybody here because um we pulled out the event but they do all the work so I feel uh slightly uncomfortable taking the credit but the rest of the team definitely deserves a big round of applause um a couple other things well one thing we've definitely seen in the last two years is a lot of companies in web 2 are getting more and more interested in web3 whether it's Integrations coming up with their own Solutions or their own competition um and a lot of them are starting to integrate and launch things at scale for hundreds of millions to billions of users do you believe that's kind of the only way to think about Mass adoption or do you believe that more companies in this space are going to become category leaders and kind of actually displace them because they're web3 native I think it's a combination of both I think we'll see web3 companies take uh that that main stage and and make it so that they're able to um some cases disrupt incumbents some cases probably more cases create new areas that hadn't ever existed before uh I think that web 2 entrance should be welcome though uh and I think that when you have these entrants that are going to make it set more people know about ethereum about crypto in general uh and they'll be onboarding all sorts of new customers uh and users in the space and developers I think that's a good thing and so you know I think it's sometimes tough because oftentimes in order to make the user experience really good there's some element of centralization that happens and obviously decentralized uh Computing is such a part of the value set of web3 uh and of this ecosystem and the correlation between centralization and distribution is also very strongly tied exactly and so also use your experience though and I I think though that uh even when that tension exists I think it's worth calling out but ultimately it's important to welcome those players I kind of want to so well this is this is extremely helpful um and yeah I don't think it's a bad thing at all like if if we see big tech companies integrate anywhere from webto Primitives to just direct protocols in their application flow I think that's a win for our space because it gets more people excited gets more people in improving those platforms and fundamentally we we win at the end of the day all of us um I also just think it's amazing like five years ago could you even imagine having this conversation like that would be just wild I mean to just name them directly Facebook launched a billion plus users getting access to nfts on Instagram and that's still insane it's it's an actual announcement you can buy these things on Instagram and I would have never assumed this would be a reality and you you can't I think you don't even have the term nft five years ago we we definitely did not so just the momentum is is absolutely insane and uh these things kind of come out of events like these um I want to end off by asking something a little bit more serious which I I think you're in the perfect position to to give advice on um we've kind of seen just elephant in the room the the economy is not doing that great we're seeing interest rates hiked up there's an energy crisis people are they're anywhere from Mass layoffs so people are just worried about what the next couple years would look like if you're entering in this market as a founder or as a developer how would you think about structuring the next couple of years especially when you're starting a company are there any advice you can give on how do you think about building successful companies what should people be mindful of uh yeah the main advice I'd give anyone who's starting a company right now is I would say make sure you have enough time to do it right uh and to actually go all the way and uh and really test your vision for figma we were super lucky and privileged to have the success the support of the teal Fellowship uh and that was basically two years of capital so a hundred thousand dollars over two years amazing um I I think that what ended up happening was that you know six months in if we had said okay six months is our our checkpoint and if we're doing well we'll keep going if not I'll go back to school uh I would have gone back to school um you know kind of like up to my list because fall back no it's not bad but but um I think we wouldn't be here because six months in we were still figuring it out and it wasn't you know even a year and we were still figuring out we didn't start charging it took more money until five years in right could we done it earlier sure but like maybe four years not five years this stuff just takes time and I think that especially when you have the dynamic in web 3 in uh in crypto of having to build a community as well the good news is that you're surrounded by this amazing community and they're so receptive and so willing to help the hard news is that you have competition too uh in terms of Mind share and it doesn't happen overnight it requires so much effort so much energy in order to build that ecosystem those networks those communities um and so my main advice would be to persevere but also to plan ahead financially and make sure you've got some time I think that's a perfect note to end this on I want to thank you for taking the time tonight and I really appreciate you being here please building a big round of applause good luck everybody see