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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Bring him into the TV film. Show him. Dylan, how are doing?
Speaker 2:Hey. Good. How are you guys doing? Oh, slid back.
Speaker 3:So we're doing great. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Did you hear the news? America just won in overtime. Would be the Canadians.
Speaker 2:I did not hear that news.
Speaker 1:In hockey? The Olympics. In hockey.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, wow.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 3:There's a lot to celebrate.
Speaker 1:Yes. But give us exciting. But give us the news in your world. How are things going?
Speaker 2:It's good. We're working hard, having fun. But, yeah, we, just, did our earnings and Mhmm. Really strong results. We're super excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 2025 was just a massive year for us, and the fourth quarter was our best quarter yet.
Speaker 1:So we 40% year over year growth. Right?
Speaker 2:You got it. That's sweet. We did three hundred four hundred and four million in revenue. Wow. And then, also, yeah, we we look at the whole year.
Speaker 2:I mean, we just shipped so much. Went from four to eight products, launched over 200 features. And most recently, earlier this week Mhmm. On Tuesday, we launched a Cloud Code to Figma Design pathway where you can go from code to the Figma Canvas. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I'm really excited about how we can do this entire round trip
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And make it possible so that wherever you start, we can give you a way to go anywhere on the Vimeo platform.
Speaker 1:Do you think people are sort of underappreciating that loop because so many of the experiences with agentic coding systems like Cloud Code are very toy projects. Like, the first time I used Codex on desktop, I just remade the TVPN homepage to look like look like Berkshire Hathaway's website. And it's like, I just took a screenshot. I didn't need to do any real work. It was a five minute thing.
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of people are amazed by the, like, toy projects, but then they don't really think about what's happening when there's a design system. This is a large organization. This is an enterprise. This is going to be something that's enduring. And so can you share a little bit more about that flywheel and what it takes to actually put these tools to use in a serious way?
Speaker 2:You know, I think it's actually really important even when you're maybe it's my mindset. I'm a perfectionist. Yeah. But even for the toy projects, I wanna go figure out, like, what is the best expression of my fun toy project. Sure.
Speaker 2:You know? Maybe something like a brochure halfway website is a fairly constrained form factor. Yeah. And so maybe that's not the best example.
Speaker 1:It's like HTML three.
Speaker 2:I recently made, for example, my friend was like, I wanna go viral in this year, and it was a birthday. Like, my goal for this year of my life is to go viral. Okay. I'm like, that well, that's kinda weird, but cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I made them a website.
Speaker 3:Lot of space to explore there. There's a lot of ways to go viral. Some some can be good.
Speaker 1:Go on an airplane. Yell at people.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What I probably should have done is say said, hey. Go talk to these guys. But instead, I I made them a website with FigmaMic Cool. And made it, you know, really beautiful and tried a few different directions out.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, I'd, you know, very quickly got to okay. Here is sort of with some custom prompting, like, a list of ways for them to go viral given who they are, and and then it's all collected together in a nice way. But even for a fun project like that, that's just like you know, I'm gonna send them. They're gonna do whatever they do. I don't know if they're gonna look at it more than a few times or even a
Speaker 1:few
Speaker 2:times, but I don't know. For me, I wanna go explore wide
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Enterprise. Yeah. You absolutely need to go think deeply about what's gonna make the best product experience for your customers, and that's not gonna be just a we're gonna go code it up and we're gonna do whatever we come up with first. Mhmm. You're going to go actually think through the option space and try to figure out what it is that you want to go steer towards.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That is critical. Mhmm. And if you don't think about that as a system, if you don't actually use all the components you've standardized on, the styles, then you're not gonna appear the same way to your customer throughout the entire user journey. And it has to really tie together with brand as well as your product as well as your point of view in your marketing and your messaging. So it's super important to make it so that you're able to have all that come together.
Speaker 2:And just being in code, I think, is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's driving the Figma Make growth? Is that the same archetype as the Figma user? Does it diverge in any interesting ways? What can you share about, like, how interesting ways people are using FigmaMake and also how you're thinking about growing that product?
Speaker 2:Yeah. When you look at FigmaMake, I think what's really cool is to see how many nondesigners are using it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And that is something that we've really picked up on. It's not just designers that are going in and making really amazing prototypes through Figma design, but also folks are coming in and making these files and prototypes and actually full working web apps and experiences. I mean, 60% of files created in Figma Make are nondesigners at this point
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Which is amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, that was a big part of the original Figma thesis was that there were going to be nondesigners using this tool
Speaker 3:Yep. From day one. Basically, you did if you looked at the TAM of the business purely on on a, you know, product designer basis, it didn't look like it would be Yeah.
Speaker 1:Business today. I don't think you ever had a job as designer. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And yet I've been using Figma every day for a decade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So yeah. That yeah. That's interesting. How do you think about the growth of that product in terms of adding plug ins, features, hosting, deployment, uptime, edge distribution?
Speaker 1:Like, that could grow into its whole thing. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Or or maybe a more simple question is, like, where where do you wanna partner? Yeah. Where do you wanna build yourself? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that we're gonna see tons of partnerships for things like FigmaMake where you need to be able to pull in context from whatever system people use. Mhmm. And then with that, use it to help create and help access data. Mhmm. But more importantly, I think that it's really key that we both create a simple surface Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That if you're just getting started, you can use. And, also, we figure out how do we make it so that you're able to go above and beyond and go really professional
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And do do things that basically require a skill ladder to traverse.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But visual first. I mean, that's the thesis, is visual first. But, yeah, make users grew 70% quarter over quarter. Mhmm. I mean, we're seeing great adoption.
Speaker 2:I think people are really resonating with the product Mhmm. And finding all sorts of fun and awesome use cases for it. And I I think there's such opportunity given the way that our active users of Make are also using Figma Design to bring these services closer together, which I think is back to the divergent point because Make is still too linear for, my taste.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 3:What, what are what feature requests are you prioritizing and most thinking about? And and what are some maybe more wild feature requests that, you may Figma may not get to?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, there's a feature request in this conversation to go do edge computing. I don't think that's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know, all of our all of the the folks out there working on edge computing, you know, come partner with us.
Speaker 1:Hardware.
Speaker 2:We're we're not in your space. Don't worry.
Speaker 1:Hardware. I I want a hardware device. You you you mentioned taste. How have you been reacting to the taste discourse? Is taste a new
Speaker 3:cycles of taste discourse have happened since Figma was started. I I think about companies like, like, Linear who who, like, to me, exemplify, like, a taste driven company. Yeah. And and how many of these cycles where they're like, oh, they they care about this again. Great.
Speaker 2:I I mean, look. Like, I think that from the start of Figma, you know, the the goal was not just to get everyone doing design or making design software usable by everybody and expanding the market. That wasn't the way we thought about it. It was like, how do we get people started on this journey where they can actually go and be more expressive, more creative, and, you know, really start to solve problems? And, you know, maybe it was a bit of, like, projection.
Speaker 2:But for me at least, I wake up in the morning. I'm like, I wanna go create software. I wanna go build stuff. And so how do I make it so that anyone with that impulse can just do that? That doesn't mean they're all gonna have, like, taste and craft and epic design skills.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think for the rest of my life, I can work on that. And many designers have made that a lifelong pursuit.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. There's something there's something that that's very real where you start on this creative journey and your taste level can be way above your skill level. And it's incredibly frustrating and some people start and they just stop Yeah. Because they feel like like I have this idea for what I want something to look like or be like and I'm kind of like trying to make things that match that and I can't.
Speaker 3:Yep. And that's part of why AI in general is like incredibly exciting because it can help you close that gap faster and potentially help you close that gap almost instantly in some circumstances. Mhmm. But you might create a 100 different outputs before getting to the one that actually meets that, you know, level.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that the the key thing is that you really have to go wide and explore and then challenge yourself. Mhmm. If you find areas where you're going, hey. Actually, I don't feel like I am liking this enough.
Speaker 2:I'm not happy enough with a solution, then you gotta go keep pushing. But the more you can sample the possibility space and see some things that you like and you don't like, it gives you something to react to. Mhmm. And I think that the the constant thing is you need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what is it that you like, you don't like, etcetera. And, you know, people talk about agents all the time, and I'm I'm obsessed with agents too.
Speaker 2:We all are. Right? Agents are cool. Yeah. But
Speaker 3:How many Mac minis do you have?
Speaker 2:No comment. No comment.
Speaker 3:Comment. He's the reason that that Mac minis sold 10.
Speaker 2:I I swear I am not caught by it. But, anyway but, yeah. But, like, I think the the bigger point going back to taste is
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, if an agent can do it for you, then unless you got some amazing sophisticated prompting that's super unique, like, an agent can do it for someone else. Mhmm. And so I think that this discourse on, like, agents are just gonna do all the things. Well, what is different about your setup than others? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You we just have to have something different there in order to not think that you're just gonna get the same thing or else you're get. Yeah. Well, even then, I don't know if it's gonna get you to get extraordinary.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We we read a post yesterday that was sort of trying to quantify the the background that leads to taste, and it was basically saying that, like, Steve Jobs was incredibly high IQ, but also had, like, varied training data in that he had, like, been homeless and, like, traveled the world and, like, got all these, like, bizarre experiences. And I'm wondering if that, like, resonates with you or you think that it's it's, like, too difficult to even quantize what makes for a great designer or great taste.
Speaker 2:You know, I think that the great designers I've met through my life, have come from so many different backgrounds. You know, a lot of a lot of folks have come through rigorous design training. Like, they just just went through a system.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:And other people, wow, they went and created, you know, their band poster. Yeah. And that got them into, like, graphic design. And then somehow they, like, showed up at the right house and crashed in someone's couch and then became a product designer and then everyone went back. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? So everything in between. And there's not really a pattern. Some people have traveled the world and, you know, gone on the meditation retreats, and some people are, like, as buttoned up as you could get and just totally straight laced. I I I think that the nice thing about designers is they're so unique, and there's no better matching.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How do you think about variability of design going forward? Are we So excited. Are we at a sort of a narrowing period because most people come with just a generic prompt? Or because I saw your Figma make examples, and I was like, I didn't even know that was possible.
Speaker 1:There were so but I was like, I would never have gotten there. So is are are there gonna be tools to maybe help people, like, be inspired by your background, which has a whole bunch of variation on it? I I I don't
Speaker 3:next thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I'm just I'm just wondering because, I mean, we were just we were just talking about a company that it feels like the prompt was, like, copy Jordy's website. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just coincidence, but it felt like, okay, like, there wasn't there wasn't, like, a twist here where it was like, oh, just do something completely different that's never been applied to this particular category at least, like, steal from a different niche instead of from the one that's, like, very, very similar. But I'm I'm wondering how you're how you're seeing, like, variation in design take take take hold in in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is the moment, I think, where we're gonna see the pendulum go from I mean, let's look back. Right? So we had the Flash era, GeoCities. Like, I'm not saying it was high quality era, but there is a lot of variation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then iPhone comes down as, like, skeuomorphism and then, like, Swiss minimalist design.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And nothing wrong with Swiss minimalist design. Like, that is a really cool and storied field and lineage. Yeah. But it is just one part of the greater aesthetic realm, and we can go into such interesting places and try so many interesting patterns on the UX side too. It's not just UI and the visuals.
Speaker 2:It's also the structure, the IA, the way that people navigate through these things and interaction patterns. Yeah. And I think there's innovation that's gonna be flourishing on all of it. Mhmm. And I'm just so excited to see the Internet get, like, really dynamic
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And really visual, and try people try things that they just have we haven't seen in a while and and things that people haven't seen ever. Because I think that that's what's gonna take to stand out now. There's gonna be so much there. Like, the exponential curve of software is just
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is taking off in a way that it's always been exponential, but now it's vertical. We talked about this before. And in order to stand out, I mean, you guys have a show that you're managing to actually break through and get people to be watching this. Like, this is not normal. Right?
Speaker 2:Like but you have worked very hard, very diligently to create the conditions under which you have this audience. Well, this this this thing that everyone has to figure out now is how are you gonna actually get any attention in a world where there's constantly new information Yeah. Even beyond America winning the ice hockey match.
Speaker 3:So Yeah. It's I've been I've been thinking about how Gen AI is impacting marketing. It's allowing somebody has like a unique idea Mhmm. And then it used to be like you had like at least a month to kind of like run with that unique idea, maybe three months if it was like, you know, a specific campaign or something like that. And now, somebody can literally fast follow you and your idea almost immediately.
Speaker 3:So good ideas always get copied Yeah. But they get copied even faster now. Another thing that that I was thinking about when you were talking about kind of the explosion of UI, John had a had a post yesterday that he was sort of jokingly making like a BuzzFeed style listicle like five five features that could explode your LLM's usage or something like that. And one of them was like caching. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And people have had this idea of like generative UIs, UIs that's being made like on the fly. And I feel like we may get we may like have products where that's happening. Right? Like, you're in an LLM and a Sure. UI is being generated.
Speaker 3:But it will still make sense, like, if if there's something that happens all the time, like, thousands, millions of times a day, billions. Like, it does not it really stops making sense to just generate it on the fly. It's like, hey. This happens a lot. Let's, like Yeah.
Speaker 3:Make the best version of this, and we don't need to, like, like
Speaker 2:on this, actually. Okay. Exactly this topic. I can send it to you if you want. But the, basically, the post was about how the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's gonna be generated.
Speaker 2:And I think this is true across media. So, basically, like, if you are writing a book, unlikely that you're gonna have, like, AI just generate your book.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Amazon booksellers would like to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Clearly, you just you can just say you don't read adult romantic fiction. Get it.
Speaker 3:No. No. No. I think I think I think Like, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, like, I think, you know, something that's like a ad that will live for, you know, a few hours.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Like, yeah, probably you're now an agent that's gonna generate that.
Speaker 3:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. The difference is, like, you're making an asset for to respond to with a meme format to news. Makes a lot of sense to, like, put that through a nano banana or ChatGPT.
Speaker 3:But if you're putting making a billboard, maybe you're still using AI to some degree, but you're gonna invest, like, significantly more time.
Speaker 2:If you're gonna make a billboard that's gonna cost money and get something up for a month and, you know, a lot of people are gonna see it. I I think you're gonna have a human touch. Yeah. We actually with Weave, now Figma Weave Yep. We, you know, we've been looking a lot at these kinds of use cases, and, you know, one thing that just we think a lot a lot is how you know this first prompt.
Speaker 2:But then you actually wanna go and have it go through a process where you can transform and mutate it. And almost like clay that's being shaped, you can treat it like a medium to get to a final output that's amazing. So, like, in our earnings call, we talked about how NVIDIA, which they've actually done since it's a public case study, they put the entire making of this Keynote online, and they use Weebie with it. And what they did was they had all these robots, and they needed to basically get to a 20 k image of this whole scene. Oh.
Speaker 2:Like, how do you create a 20 k image with perfect lighting throughout? I mean, it's really tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so they had a whole custom pipeline with Weebly they did. Yeah. And just like the amount of work to go do that at scale of that pixel density Mhmm. Is immense, and I I thought their workflow was super cool. So
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:With you too.
Speaker 1:I love it. Cool. Yeah. Please send us that. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3:Always a good time. Were we were so fired up seeing the results from yesterday. Really a testament to how locked in locked in the team.
Speaker 2:Team is amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're working so hard, and, they're just an incredible team. I'm so grateful. Yeah. And I think it's a proof point. I mean, I think that we're we're gonna see it over and over again, whether it's the taste discourse
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just customers with Figma, but design is a differentiator. Like, figure it out. Go learn design. Hire your designer. Otherwise, you're gonna have a hard time.
Speaker 2:That's my last message.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 1:see you. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.