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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, 07/31/2025. We are live from the New York Stock Exchange. It's the Pigma IPO.
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance.
Speaker 1:This is the real fortress finance. We have created a simulacrum of the fortress of finance in Hollywood, California. But today, we're in New York City. We're in Manhattan. We're in the Financial District.
Speaker 1:We're on Wall Street at the New York Stock Exchange, and the mood is electric. It is wild.
Speaker 2:Just down here a second ago, the there was a crowd breaking out, cheering.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And it is really a sight to see.
Speaker 1:Yes. So, Figma is going, public today. And, earlier today, Dylan Field and the Figma team rang the bell to open the market. And then, throughout the course of the day, the the the market is in the process of, of filling orders and actually taking the stock public and getting liquidity into the stock.
Speaker 2:And, I will say Figma has really made this place their own. Every single floor space in this building has been designed.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Which makes sense. They're taking design public.
Speaker 1:There's little, like, graphics on the floor. There's every single every single digital billboard has been done up with a motion graphic treatment.
Speaker 2:Even signs pointing you around the building. The merch, they Yes. They made merch for
Speaker 1:guess this is the
Speaker 2:process that they do, but they made merch for a bunch of the employees in the building, and they're all wearing it. It looks stunning. I want it for myself.
Speaker 1:Everyone's very happy.
Speaker 2:And it's just absolutely incredible to be here.
Speaker 1:So we will be interviewing a number of people today in and around the Figma IPO, taking you through the story of what's unfolding here on the ground.
Speaker 2:Some guy with the username Zoink.
Speaker 1:Oh, he
Speaker 2:He's got a NFT profile picture.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I see him called.
Speaker 2:Might be oh, his name
Speaker 1:is Dylan Field. Field.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Dylan Field will be joining the show. Very excited for that. Chris, the CTO of Figma will be joining as well. Great.
Speaker 2:Of course, Andrew Reed, a friend of the show and former guest will be joining from Sequoia. And then Danny from Index Good know. From Kleiner Perkins, and last but not least, Lynn Martin from the New York Stock Exchange itself.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So we should have about a ninety minute show for you. We are going to, say thanks to our sponsors now. Thank you to Ramp. Ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Time is money. Say both. Thank you to Figma, one of our sponsors. We're very proud to be partnering with them. Vanta, you can go to vanta.com.
Speaker 1:Linear, linear.app. Graphite, graphite dot dev. 8sleep.com, of course. Wander, you can find your happy place at wander.com. Public.com, if you're looking to trade public securities.
Speaker 1:Adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Bezel, go to getbezel.com. Numerohq.com, adio.com, thin.ai, and of course, restream, which wouldn't which, this stream wouldn't be possible without. So without further ado, let's, take you through what else is in the news so then we can dive more deeply into the Figma IPL. So Great.
Speaker 1:Covered this yesterday.
Speaker 2:Bit distracting. Everybody keeps breaking out into applause.
Speaker 1:And the people are really, really happy. It's, it's we'll get into some of the timeline and and what's going on.
Speaker 3:Everyone's very happy.
Speaker 2:For me on a personal level, I mean, I'll I'll start this off by saying, nothing on today's show is financial advice. Yes. We're not qualified
Speaker 1:to give
Speaker 2:financial advice. We're qualified, but I do feel qualified to talk about the product. Yeah. I was lucky I've basically been lucky to spend my entire career using
Speaker 1:Here we go.
Speaker 2:I can't even hear myself because people are
Speaker 1:You gotta yell into the mic. They're really they're yep. So yeah. We're we're we're
Speaker 2:we're we're trading.
Speaker 1:I think it's opening. Fantastic. So, yeah, you were gonna talk about your your journey using Figma. Okay. It's a real overnight success.
Speaker 1:So the the stock is officially open. Here we go. Everyone's excited. You can hear it.
Speaker 2:And, people on X are celebrating. They, maybe got access to one share.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. They're trouble with that.
Speaker 2:They are.
Speaker 1:The listings. But the excitement is palpable across both the online and offline world. We're seeing it here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's so many people that wanted to invest in this business forever. Rounds Totally. Rounds ago. Totally.
Speaker 2:In the private markets. And it's it's
Speaker 1:Even public companies wanted to invest in Figma at one point.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Do a little bit more
Speaker 1:than invest. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:But anyways But now public. Say, I mean, the the context here, you know, is very surreal for me. I I've been lucky. I don't really know a time before Figma.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sketch was like kind of on the way out. I I used it, you know, here and there early in my career. But I've been in Figma every single day. As somebody that never identified as a designer Sure. More a of an ideas guy, more of a product guy.
Speaker 2:Sure. And it's just been with me throughout my entire career and and it someone was saying on the timeline, I think it was Norgard who was saying, you can tell when a product's made with love. And despite Figma, you know, growing and and launching so many different products over the years, you can just tell that the people that design and build Figma care so much about the people that use the products. Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A true overnight success. Four years, working Four
Speaker 2:years grinding.
Speaker 1:To launch a fat MVP as they call it, and then another decade or so, building the public, building the product and the customer base and launching a lot of products. That's right. What what a fantastic journey. I remember, like, learning about Dylan Field as this, like, you know, Teal fellow, Wunderkind, and and seeing that the product was growing and that they were always getting rounds done, but they were never, like the totally frothy company. It was just like compounding
Speaker 2:I I pulled it up earlier. So Index did the seed round
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and somebody, Terrence Rohan, I guess was Okay. There as well. Yeah. I'm so I'm sure he's
Speaker 1:He's doing
Speaker 2:happy well. Today. Yep. And then Greylock did the series a, but the seed round was 3,800,000.0, somewhat of a modest seed Wow. In today's dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The series a was by Greylock for 14,000,000 in total. Yeah. KP did the b, a $25,000,000 round. Andrew Reed and Sequoia came in and did 40 and then the Series D was 50.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing is I believe it was GC and Iconic Yeah. That did the round in 2022. Okay. I'm gonna look it
Speaker 1:up. Sure.
Speaker 2:But anyways, the vibes here on Wall Street are good. It's absolutely electric. If you look
Speaker 1:at Yeah. It It's not just stigma. The timing is remarkable because, yeah, I mean, yesterday, we got news that the The US GDP grew at 3%, which beat estimates. And so the economy has returned to growth is on the front of the Wall Street Journal, of course. We covered this a little bit yesterday, but, obviously, a good environment.
Speaker 1:People were talking about, like, will the IPO window open? And it kind of opened months ago, but people were still not declaring it fully open because it felt like, oh, this is one special company that's sneaking out. This is just one maybe this is Or
Speaker 2:Core Weave. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Core Weave. That Exactly. Stablecoins. Yep.
Speaker 1:Now it's okay. Well, all of the companies that make sense are now going public and, it's really
Speaker 2:some commentary earlier, on the timeline. People talking about more companies need to be taking advantage of this moment. Sure. Right? There's a lot of companies that probably, you know, the the window's wide open.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:If it makes sense. But it doesn't make sense for every company to go public for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2:And the bar is just so high now. It is. Part of what makes the Figma IPO set special, just looking at the rule of 40 and Yeah. Just looking at their business broadly, it's, you know, coming out and and, you know, day one being one of the most impressive companies Yeah. In SaaS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And then the other news is that the Fed has kept rates steady over rare descents. Two of the members of the Fed said, no. We should lower rates, but they were overruled, and the Fed kept rates high.
Speaker 1:And this is interesting because you you'd think if they if they cut rates, we'd see the market ripping even more. The market's already ripping, which is kind of like it feels like a little bit of, a safety deposit box, like a Yeah. A rainy day fund that if something doesn't go well in the markets, there's still that lever to pull. And so Yeah. It it it feels reassuring.
Speaker 1:The economy is growing well. We're also seeing big tech earnings perform very well. And then we also have high rates. So I mean, timing of lever like, the health of the consumer is strong. Unemployment's doing well.
Speaker 1:There there's just good news all across the economy, which I feel like dancing around from one one bull case, one minor story,
Speaker 2:one sliver
Speaker 1:of hope for a while. Now we're really firing on
Speaker 2:all Big the tech big tech. Big tech having just blow out earnings yesterday.
Speaker 1:Is that what I call Figma big deck? Big tech. Design your decks.
Speaker 2:I've made so many decks in Figma. You wouldn't But, yeah, big tech just blowing out earnings. Microsoft Yes. Meta, etcetera. Certainly doesn't hurt.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw the I saw the headline number. We talked about Google having something like a $100,000,000,000 in in cloud backlog. So if they could fill it today, they could just make a $100,000,000,000 of I mean, these might be longer dated contracts. People
Speaker 4:might not
Speaker 1:want this. But
Speaker 2:kind of business this is not financial advice, but business advice. Yes. Build up a $100,000,000,000 customer backlog.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Demand backlog. Just do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Especially Focus
Speaker 2:on that. Everything else will kind
Speaker 1:of solve itself. Yeah. The share price will take care of itself at that point. So Google's been doing very well. I apparently, Azure and Microsoft cloud has eve an even larger backlog, something around 300,000,000,000 I was seeing.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure. But the Wall Street Journal's breaking down Microsoft's cloud business, is driving a lot of the profits. That makes sense in the age of AI and every
Speaker 2:our company. Relationship with OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so the Wall Street Journal kicks off by saying demand for Microsoft's artificial intelligence services continues to pay off for the company. Its cloud computing units saw another high growth quarter, while the tech giant spends heavily on building out its AI data centers. Now there has been some timeline and turmoil over whether or not the depreciation is, the depreciation calculations are too aggressive for some of the hyperscalers. Somebody was talking about meta specifically.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. I'm I when when I was reading into it, a lot of people were saying like, no. The depreciation schedule is widely disclosed. It's actually very well understood. They're not doing anything that crazy.
Speaker 1:And, yes, it feels like it feels crazy to go out and buy a ton of the most advanced NVIDIA GPUs that might be quote unquote obsolete, like next year when there's a new model and new hardware out there that you wanna that we wanna be taking advantage of. Yeah. But if you think about there's cloud workloads staying around and growing and doing the thing that is that they are capable at for a very long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we've covered a
Speaker 4:lot on the show,
Speaker 2:sort of like capability overhang, even if the models don't get smarter, which they are. There's still so much to build and so much value to unlock Yep. The agentic workflows.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And who doesn't love I mean,
Speaker 1:there's so many, like, PDFs to pipeline into databases and just
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're still getting really good at PDFs.
Speaker 1:Knowledge retrieval. Just basic knowledge retrieval is just a massive market for for for business overall. So, the Cloud's group's the Cloud Group's strong performance, powered Microsoft during the last quarter of the fiscal year. The company on Wednesday also outlined that its first quarter would be better than analysts projected. Wall Street cheered and the result cheered the results, sending shares of Microsoft up 9% in aftermarket trading.
Speaker 1:The support carries over, if the support carries over to trading Thursday, which is today, the company could be worth around $4,000,000,000,000. That's that number that NVIDIA broke. But, also, of course, their CapEx is growing, significantly, and they are getting very, very close to spending over $25,000,000,000 in a current in a single quarter on capex. But when you have that type of cloud backlog, it makes a lot of sense to build the data centers to service that backlog.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Saadzi has also been fairly pragmatic. If you think about Sure. You know, some of I mean, he's conducted multiple layoffs this year. He's clearly feeling the pull of AI, but not getting over his skis.
Speaker 2:Yep. Wants to wants you know, seems to be managing through this kind of euphoric Yeah. Revenue ramp
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very well. I a funny post that was like something in effect of like, well, we now know that Sacha is good for his 80,000,000,000 Yep. Because he blew out earnings, and he's been doing fantastically. So just since April, where after, Liberation Day and all of the big tech stocks kind of selling off in the first quarter of the year, Microsoft's been in absolute tear, up 20% over the baseline on the year, where the S and P five hundred's been around 8% up.
Speaker 1:And so outperforming the S and P 500 broadly, big tech continues undefeated. The Windows
Speaker 2:Microsoft is, sitting at 3,980,000,000,000.00. Oh, it's up 4% today, but they're just touching four t.
Speaker 1:They're trying
Speaker 2:to do it.
Speaker 1:They're trying to
Speaker 2:do it. So close.
Speaker 1:Well, good luck to them and everyone involved.
Speaker 2:The the the funny thing to think about is imagine you joined Meta
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe a couple weeks ago and the stock with with this, like, you know, massive, 9 figure comp, structure. And then you're immediately made you you've been averaging basically making, you know, an extra million dollars a day in stock based comp if you
Speaker 1:Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:People were running the math on how many AI researchers, you know, you you know, the the added, you know, you you could you could Zuck could go and do this this round of aggressive
Speaker 1:Like every every single day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every single day for for a while.
Speaker 1:It's wild. So let's continue with Microsoft earnings. The Windows maker is among the many tech companies trying to cash in on the expected AI windfall. The cloud offerings its cloud offerings put it in stronger position to capitalize than other firms because, of course, they are very neutral in terms of what they are building. Has been very model agnostic.
Speaker 1:He has great access to OpenAI, which is a leading API, but then he's also happy to sell you Lama or Grok or anything else. And so Yeah. He's he's he's kind of acting as a day de facto model router in many ways. Yeah. Model router companies are obviously doing something different and helpful in in other contexts, especially in terms of bidding against Microsoft.
Speaker 2:He's excited to be a platform. But
Speaker 1:but he is embracing the platform. Of course. Of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm interested to see if the markets when when the OpenAI Microsoft negotiation around their whole licensing deal
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:They're cheering again. Not exactly sure why, but I I love the sound of it. And anyways, it'll be interesting to see if the market reacts positively to that at I know Satya cares a lot about the partnership. Yeah. And I'm sure both sides are are negotiating their hearts out.
Speaker 1:So Satya Nadella said, we are going through a generational tech shift with Absolutely true. Microsoft reported revenue of 76,400,000,000.0 for its fourth fiscal quarter. The figure topped Wall Street's expectations. It's closely watched Azure cloud business grew 39%, beating expectations. This is already a massive business in a highly competitive market.
Speaker 1:They compete directly with GCP and AWS. And so they're doing fantastically. All the cloud providers seem to be doing very well. Yep. Operating income increased 22% to 34,300,000,000.0, higher than consensus projections on top line and bottom line.
Speaker 1:The company said net income was 27,200,000,000.0, or $3.65 a diluted share. That figure also topped analyst projections. They're just blowing it out across the board. This AI adoption is really helping the whole whole portfolio. It certainly gives us great confidence in our ability to continue to lead in the cloud, an AI wave that is here.
Speaker 1:And so in other news, the micro Meta also beat earnings and went up, what, 10%, something like that. Yeah. You mentioned this soaring at Meta ad revenue fuels push into artificial intelligence. 22% revenue growth in its second quarter. We've talked to a lot of people about this.
Speaker 1:Like, they're just like, when you're in one of these companies that has the ability to continue to compound seemingly endlessly, it's just one of the best
Speaker 2:Online ads are a big market.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of the best financial phenomenon to ever exist. Yeah. And so, showing that core ad revenue, business remains strong at a time when the company is investing billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. For the first time this year, the company spending its top capital is, held its top capital spending projection steady, a move that is sure to ease investor concerns after, Mark Zuckerberg's AI spending spree.
Speaker 1:Shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. And it's interesting to read into the CapEx numbers because we were we were talking about that they might be limited on power. So it might not be that Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta team want to necessarily hold back CapEx, but the market and and the and the and the public market certainly is looking at that as, oh, well, you know, ad revenue grew a ton, and you didn't even need to spend more on CapEx. Maybe that's coming down the down the pipe in coming quarters, but not this quarter. And so everything across the board looks looks much better for the company.
Speaker 1:Shares rose more than 11% in after hours trading. The results show the extent to which Meta's advertising business will continue to pay for the company's outsized AI ambitions, as well as how the AI tools are contributing to to its strength. Sales came in at 47,500,000,000.0, ahead of analyst expectations, and net income was at 18,300,000,000.0, also ahead of market expectations. Technology giant said it expects to post between 1724% revenue growth year over year for the current quarter. The investments it's making in AI are already paying off in its ads business, said a researcher.
Speaker 1:That is the third biggest technology company to report this earnings cycle, and shareholders are keeping a close watch on the extent to which revenue is increasing as a result of the AI boom relative to spending levels.
Speaker 2:So And Geiger Capital is reporting on X. Meta is now up 760% from its 2022 low Wow. After the failure of the metaverse. Never doubt Zuck. Obviously, was a bunch of other factors Yeah.
Speaker 2:Going on there, broader correction, rise in in
Speaker 1:But it's but it's the yeah. The metaverse that certainly didn't translate to bottom line is
Speaker 2:I do remember you did. The the iconic image of Zac's face in the meta verse, you
Speaker 1:know Yeah. The Wii that moment. The the the Wii graphics.
Speaker 2:Okay. We're a little bit away from the metaverse. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and the and the and the the Oculus or the Meta Quest would sell well at at Christmas time, but it wouldn't like, the stickiness just wasn't there to drive real adoption. And then, of course, you know, the whole goal was never just to be in the hardware business and sell $300 headsets. The goal was to be a platform and then take an ad store like cut of all software that's sold through those headsets. You need you can't just get the install base up. You actually have to get the DAU base up.
Speaker 1:Meta hasn't happened yet, but it maybe will in the future.
Speaker 2:Meta ended 2024 with 44,000,000,000 in cash Mhmm. In cash equivalents. They're now down to 12,000,000,000. So he's been spent he's not spending spree.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Which which makes sense. We've been tracking it. I wanted to cover Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have a discussion. Here that Sarah Guo just posted. She says, design goes public. It took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. I I think she's here in the building somewhere.
Speaker 1:She is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll try to get her on. She says, it took Dylan Field and Evan Wallace more than four years to go from founding Figma to public launch. They built Figma playing for the end game, not the headlines. Dylan didn't chase growth at all costs or settle what they could ship in ten weeks.
Speaker 2:He didn't try to crush competitors. Instead, he spent a decade obsessing over the product he imagined should exist in the best company he could. Making design and software product delivery more powerful and collaborative. He consistently acted with integrity and thoughtfulness. Turns out not just good Turn turns out that's not just good philosophy, it's a strategy for a special business.
Speaker 2:In 2014, when John Lilly led Greylock series a investment, Dylan and his team had seven people in a nondescript office on Alma Street in Palo Alto and barely an Alpha product, but they described a future with remarkable foresight. A high performance, collaborative, multiplayer design tool built natively for the web, harnessing all its power, changing product development forever. And this product was just so incredibly viral. Obviously people don't design in a silo. They would make something, share it with people You could just open it in the browser.
Speaker 2:You could see everyone else's cursor. And we take that kind of software for granted now, but it's because so many different companies realized how powerful it was Yep. And, moved to, and you know, inspired were by by Figma.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's the difference between Instagram and hips Hypstomatic. Like, they both had photo filtering and people saw them as, like, tools for photo filtering. But Instagram bootstrapped a network Yeah. And was worth billions. And now, probably, we have you spun it out worth like hundreds of billions.
Speaker 2:So, Sarah says Figma had its fair share of challenges. Market size was an early question. Right? People were just looking at the market and being like, how many designers are there really out there? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:How many are willing to pay for this?
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:And they were burning Sarah says they were burning 800,000 a month pre launch. So no no sign No no real sign of validation other than their own conviction.
Speaker 1:So bold.
Speaker 2:She says like with any startup getting early pilot customers required cajoling of our friends, competitors who built less product for a while seemed ahead. Dylan persisted driven more by conviction than fear. He assembled a team of remarkable people, Chris Rasmussen who's gonna be on later. Yep. Sho Kuomato, Claire Butler, Prevere, Melwani, Kyle Parish, Amanda, Claya, Yuki Yamashita and more.
Speaker 2:Each of these Figmates, which is a good name.
Speaker 1:Figmates. Contributed extraordinary Fig Leafs.
Speaker 2:Fig Leafs.
Speaker 1:But Figmates makes more and more sense.
Speaker 2:Dylan himself evolved dramatically along the way from a clearly talented thoughtful dropout founder to a formidable CEO capable of scaling a legendary company. And this is a special special one for me to to again to just experience the product first as a user and then somebody that, you know, followed followed tech closely and being able to watch watch watch his evolution as a CEO is just amazing. I mean, the the hardest the hardest
Speaker 1:who thing was Dylan Field was or did you use the product first?
Speaker 2:I think he always had insane aura. I do think I used the product. I must have used the product first.
Speaker 1:Probably used the product first or it was brought into my my organization first. Because again, it's not like he
Speaker 2:was coming out the gate raising 50,000,000 or whatever. These were like relatively normal rounds. They were great
Speaker 1:I mean, by completely different go to market motion back then too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was viral launch video podcast
Speaker 2:like for growth. Yes.
Speaker 1:It was entirely Original.
Speaker 2:The showing the power of that. At just a few million in revenue, the board received a letter about aligning our path to IPO. Very few people very few other people play secret Hitler as ruthlessly against their own spouse or casually suggest Oh. Starting a game of diplomacy at 11PM. These aren't just games to Dylan.
Speaker 2:They were exercises in long term strategy, the same discipline that meant Figma. I don't know if the I something I'm convinced had never been done before to a room full of bankers, mutual fund managers, and hedge fund investors. Afterwards, Dylan turned to me with that familiar, slightly nutty gleam in his eye. I want them to understand the product they're investing in. They're all gonna be designers eventually.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:I do believe that. I in some ways, I've become a better designer over the years even though I'm not classically trained Yeah. Just because the Figma products gotten better. Yeah. Like as Figma gets better, I get better and that's such a powerful feedback loop.
Speaker 2:Today, millions rely on Figma and its scope and power continues expanding. The IPO is proof that special founders can reshape even entrenched categories and and that they will find the surrounding hills to climb and focus on product is rarely wrong. It underscores that technology matters. We covered this yesterday and at config but you know that focus on WebGL early like that was that was the why now. And, it's it it can be rare to have a true technological why now.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, founders try to I
Speaker 1:think that's the first trade. First trade. Dylan just rang the bell for the First first
Speaker 2:is at ninety three. Alright. Climbing at ninety three.
Speaker 1:Climbing. Wow. That is amazing.
Speaker 2:Dylan looks absolutely fantastic. It does. A purple suit.
Speaker 1:That's remarkable. We should just turn this around. We'll show the screen right there.
Speaker 2:Good idea.
Speaker 1:There we go. You can see the screen.
Speaker 2:Put it put it down and just point it up maybe. There we go. Oh.
Speaker 1:Don't know
Speaker 2:emotional. So emotional. It's remarkable. Went through the the almost acquisition block and to make back here, well beyond, and and the the employees too. I mean, the the resilience.
Speaker 2:Right? Totally. We saw this last week, not or the week before
Speaker 1:Two weeks ago.
Speaker 2:You know, the the windsurf team thinking they're they're getting acquired by Yeah. It's a roller coaster. Doesn't go through, and and that was a different scenario. But Yeah. They had they really had to Yeah.
Speaker 2:Build, you know, find find a new gear. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I mean, we we all know that there was a breakup fee, but
Speaker 2:Yeah. It didn't hurt.
Speaker 1:But the val like like the the value of focus is just so underrated. And you think about that for that, like, how long were they going through that process? Like, a year? And the amount of distraction, both from just, like, a legal compliance financial thing, but also just, like, well, you think you're gonna partner up with somebody. Are you gonna build a competitor?
Speaker 1:Are you gonna be, like, okay. Let's just not put that let's push that out on the road map because we do we're we're we're partnering Scott with they'll bring that to the
Speaker 2:yeah. Scott Belsky was
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To it running effectively running running the show over And, you know, disappointing for him as well, but he obviously was very congratulatory. Yes. Sarah says, I'll close it out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:She says, we're all gonna be designers eventually. Congratulations Figma. And, yeah, design's going public today. Design's Scott's going post.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Read me Scott's post. What a crazy day. Citadel Securities in the back looking great.
Speaker 2:Scott says Indeed, Blue. Thrilled for my friend Dylan and the whole Figma team today upon such a milestone. There are a few products that have had such an impact on the lives of designers, our everyday experiences of products and the value of design. He says, had, a unique opportunity to get to know the entire Figma management team and business very deeply a few years ago. Of course, Scott was, at Adobe at the time.
Speaker 2:Yep. You know, one of the, key players in the deal. And he says, what I learned inspired me in many ways and makes me confident that this team is just getting started. This is a team with deep empathy for empathy for their customer. They of course, in my words are the customer.
Speaker 2:That's part of what Yeah. Figma uses Figma to make Figma. Yeah. Like this perfect perfect partnership.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The s one showed that?
Speaker 2:The s one showed that.
Speaker 1:Great. Was
Speaker 2:very nicely.
Speaker 1:S one of all time.
Speaker 2:But yeah, the the the story here is the thoughtfulness. Right? Down Mhmm. Down to the signage in the building today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every single step has been considered. And they have to, right? If they want to help other people have great design. Yeah. They need to lead by example.
Speaker 2:I have a post here from John Lilly Okay. Who was I believe John was at, Greylock. Okay. Let me confirm that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw Greylock on the cap table. Pretty big shareholder.
Speaker 2:Probably over 2%. Greylock led the a.
Speaker 5:Okay.
Speaker 2:And John Lilly
Speaker 1:on the through a bunch of pro ratas.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Did quite well.
Speaker 2:Yep. John says, today's IPO is a landmark moment for Figma, not just a financial milestone, but a powerful validation of Dylan and Evan's founding vision back in 2012 to eliminate the gap between imagination and reality. Figma's relentless focus on product community and craft has reshaped how the world designs. What began as a bold technical challenge, building a web based design tool that felt native, evolved into platform that helped millions of creators design and build together. In a 2003 interview about the iPod, Steve Jobs famously said, design is not just what it looks like and feels like.
Speaker 2:Design is how it works. Figma built around this idea, building tools so that designers of all kinds come together not just to make things beautiful, but to make them work better. And now we're standing at the threshold of a new era, one defined by the rise of artificial intelligence. It's an especially important moment to ask, what does the future of design look like? I think that's every on everybody's mind.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people have good, ideas for what it can look like. John says, design has always existed in the space between tools and human intention. And as Mitch Kapoor wrote in his 1990 software design manifesto, what is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds. The world of technology and the world of people and human purposes.
Speaker 2:And you try to bring the two together. That's powerful. Thirty five years later, that's still the clearest expression I know of what great design strives to do. And it's what Figma enables a connection between imagination and reality and between the systems we build and the people we build them for, between our machines and ourselves. Not not John My words not John's, but, it's so funny to think about how when you are interacting with anything online Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's like probably like a 80% chance that it was built with Figma Yeah. At some point or another. You can't open an app on your phone Yep. And not have a designer under the hood that probably spends, you know, hours and hours a day Yeah. In Figma.
Speaker 2:I have so many great I have so many great memories.
Speaker 1:And the stock is over a $100 now. Is remarkable. Wow. And I saw something that I it it seemed like there was potentially some sort of circuit breaker going on where there was a like a limit up where it seemed like they stopped trading for a little bit and then resumed, but the stock is jumping all over the place. I'm seeing like $1.00 7 now.
Speaker 1:Really really on a rocket ship today.
Speaker 2:A couple couple of fond memories for me. One is with Brandon Jacoby.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:He's at x. He's a free agent now. We'll see how long that's sick.
Speaker 1:Sigma users to ever do it.
Speaker 2:And I have so there were so many nights when we were building Party Round
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That, it it was, like, deep COVID, so we were we were often remote. And so many nights we would spend just in Figma for and had Zoom in the background, Figma just, like, just grinding it out. And, I I cherish those memories. The other thing, Sumit over formerly at Andreessen brought up today when I posted earlier.
Speaker 2:He said that when I was pitching a 16 z originally Mhmm. Almost the entire pitch, I didn't have a deck when I first met them. So the entire pitch was walking around all of our product designs in Figma, showing them the product, showing them where we wanted to take it. And so That's amazing. Been such a such a core core part.
Speaker 2:I'll close it out with John. He says, on a personal level too, this is a significant moment for me. I was lucky in my career to be mentored by some of the best thinkers and designers in the world, Terry Winograd and David Kelley at Stanford and later Mitch Kapoor and many others. And from the very first time I set foot in Figma's offices, I felt like I'd come home. Dylan and Evan had built a temple of design with typography books Let's scattered go.
Speaker 2:We love temples. Let's give it up for temples.
Speaker 1:Let's give it up for temples.
Speaker 2:But the whole company culture was infused with a belief in and a reverence for designers and their work, And that's still the core value of Figma today.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:You I I we we made somebody mad sometime, when we joked on the show.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:We joked on the show that, like like Figma hadn't, like, released some feature fast enough.
Speaker 1:They released the video on
Speaker 2:the street.
Speaker 1:To do to do to do, to create more responsive designs automatically. Yeah. And we were like, people were we people were protesting the street for this one.
Speaker 2:Obviously Somebody somebody came out and and very angrily messaged
Speaker 1:us saying no one was protesting. No one was protesting. This is fake news. And we were like, okay. We were joking, but people do love Figma.
Speaker 1:It's a thing. Like,
Speaker 2:it's okay. People get emotional about
Speaker 3:it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was the thing. We were at we were at config, and and the number of people that there was somebody from every country there.
Speaker 1:It it was standing room only. It was crazy.
Speaker 3:The the
Speaker 1:the community is wild. Yeah.
Speaker 2:John says, one of the other things that Mitch said to me about entrepreneurship is that you've got to build a house you wanna live in. In other words, build organizations that can help create the world you want Yeah. By elevating and empowering designers. Figma has done that in a profound and lasting way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Here's to the team at Figma and to continue to build the world of designing together. It's so true. I mean, the the a world without Figma, every digital product that you use is less beautiful. Yeah. Every website that you use
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is less beautiful.
Speaker 1:Do you think, in the original Microsoft formulation of what a platform is, Figma fits that definition? So the original, I think it was Bill Gates', conception of it was a platform is a is a business or product that where the value that is created on top of the platform is greater than the value that is captured by the platform.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:And so the classic example is, yeah, is Microsoft Windows. They're like, the Windows app ecosystem is larger than the amount of money captured by just Windows licenses. And when you think about Figma, it's a little bit different because although there is a third party ecosystem, there are also, like, design agencies that probably wouldn't exist.
Speaker 2:I mean, the part of why Figma has such a great brand is they can't possibly they they can't possibly capture there's so much value creation, like, happening on the platform. Yep. And it's as simple as, like, a company signing up, two founders paying $50 a month or
Speaker 1:whatever it feels like they got their money's worth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and creating something that allows them to go create a deck that allows them to raise millions of dollars or creating a product with millions of users. Yep. And and that and that flow of like somebody can be a freelance designer, sign up for Figma, create designs that they they can go sell and and Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I think it definitely fits the definition. It's it's very much a it's an operating system Yeah. For people that design and build software.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about it yesterday. Ben Thompson gave a breakdown on Strathecari, which you should go read and subscribe to, obviously, of this Figma S1 and the IPO prospects. And he was highlighting the potential the potential benefit of being a public company and having public company stock
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:To do m and a with. And I'm wondering where you sit on the M and A question. There's the world where Figma has a talented team that can build new products. They also have this network effect. They have amazing go to market and sales motion.
Speaker 1:Yep. But we if they were to acquire something, what what do you think would be the right angle? Is it more something like a foundational technology that can improve all the products or some sort of new line extension, new SKU to add on to the portfolio of products. I I think that's where the debate Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's great question. I mean, I I I'm less excited about what they I'm I'm personally more excited about them acquiring better, you know I mean, the team is obviously beyond stacks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's one
Speaker 2:of the most talented groups in in in certainly design. Well, the most talented group in design and Yeah. And one of the most talented teams in the industry broadly. I'm less excited about individual app plays, although there's some exciting gen AI Yep. Applications that are growing quickly.
Speaker 2:Yep. Figma has compelling products in those categories. Right? You look at Figma Make, Figma Sites. Yep.
Speaker 2:Right? And everything they're doing around making it so that anyone within an organization can generate designs Yep. That are on brand.
Speaker 1:I guess the question is yeah. Like
Speaker 2:And again, trading has been halted Okay. At a $112.112.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:On a limit up.
Speaker 1:If if someone goes out and builds not just a not just a tool that is complementary, but also has a network and is starting to bootstrap a network, that feels like the Instagram, Facebook moment and something that would potentially merit an m and a.
Speaker 2:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:But just building a tool or different approach to the product or different feature, always this question about, like, you know, is it a feature or is it a company? Yeah. And I think that'll be something that people are
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are are debating going forward. They acquired a buddy of mine, Jordan Jordan Singer's company. That's right. I think it was probably two plus years ago. Sure.
Speaker 2:And he was in building in, you know, very early to building in in generative AI. I believe they integrated a lot of what he was working on. Yeah. I do wonder,
Speaker 1:on the on the M and A topic, like, what is the formula for success? Because there's a little bit of a meme in Silicon Valley that, like, you should never sell your company. You can never work. Then there are, like, these zombie acqui hires that feel like something that people wanna avoid. And so one of the questions that have been kicking around my head is like, what is the shape of the company or founding team or employee base that is suitable for an acquisition
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That could actually integrate well and be something where everyone is happy a decade later? Like, oh, yeah. That was a fantastic partnership. That was great. It it it probably has to be something around the the the acceleration that would happen post acquisition.
Speaker 1:And then also just the the the actual integration and and
Speaker 2:Yeah. There was a while back, you remember this company. It was a six month own six month old solo owned Vibe Cutter. Remember the base 44 sold to Wix for 80,000,000, which was not, to my knowledge, not in the game at all from a from a generative AI standpoint. So looks like we have our first Let's
Speaker 1:bring him in.
Speaker 2:We have Andrew Reed coming in. Andrew Reed.
Speaker 1:In a beautiful suit.
Speaker 4:Looking good.
Speaker 2:Somebody somebody confused me.
Speaker 1:Guys do look
Speaker 2:Tell me what's similar. I hey. You're Andrew. Right? I said, I am not, but he is close by.
Speaker 2:What's going on?
Speaker 1:Andrew, welcome to the stream. You're alive. How are doing?
Speaker 2:You are live. Welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having us. You guys
Speaker 3:look like you were made to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes. We're
Speaker 2:very happy to be
Speaker 1:This decision to put on the seats six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this.
Speaker 3:Is this my microphone? That's your microphone. Wonderful.
Speaker 1:How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you?
Speaker 3:Let's see. Well, first off, congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 3:It's very exciting. Today has been it's been a good day. You know, you open Yeah. Dylan rang the bell at 09:30, and it's 02:11PM eastern right now. Sure.
Speaker 3:So we've been milling around for many hours. Okay.
Speaker 1:It's a little exhausting.
Speaker 3:It opened and, yeah, it's amazing seeing the team here. Yeah. And just the excitement of everyone chanting Figma and seeing all the traders in their swagged out Figma jackets.
Speaker 2:The jackets are they're gonna go into market, you know, bidding jackets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because those are
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally iconic. On the second row.
Speaker 7:The thing
Speaker 2:that stood out to me is all the little like, they really made they really made Nicee their home. Like, every, like, every single place you look, there's something Figma and it's just so so incredibly well done.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And this one of my one of the experiences I've had with Figma, you know, dating back to when we first invested seven years ago was it's a company success. Overnight success. Yes. It's company that's always had extraordinary attention to detail.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And, you know, it shows up when you do an all hands at their office. Yeah. And the way
Speaker 2:do one.
Speaker 3:The board sides the s one, config the conference. And how they applied that attention to detail to the NIZI is incredible because, you know, there's applying the attention to detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground and the party outside. Like they just did an unbelievable job.
Speaker 2:You have to be doing things that haven't been done before.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I think the the takeover outside was, like, breathtaking. And I'm obviously very biased because I see the people look like I'm very excited. But Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's like
Speaker 1:Did you see the roadshow? Did you go to any of the roadshow? I heard there was, a long product demo there
Speaker 3:which is kind of uncommon. Yeah. So I think it's I think this is true for, you know, many CEOs, but especially for Dylan. Like, Dylan cares a lot about the product. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what Figma not just what Figma stands for in design and creativity and all the things you see Yep. But really how the product works. And it was not a five minute fly by, you know, look at the cool, you know, shiny features.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:The product demo was, you know, they were in the weeds. It was yeah. I was I in fact uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed. But it was good. Think it's important.
Speaker 3:Again, like, part of, you know, that's who Dylan is. Right? He, like, actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and Yeah. And every single feature and then that shows through.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How early did you actually meet Dylan? Sarah Sarah Guo was posting earlier that prelaunch they were burning $800,000 a month, which just sounds like that's the most nerve wracking scenario for any you know, a lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special foundry was?
Speaker 3:Well, Dylan and Evan, by the way Yeah. I think just I think it's it's a nice moment to take a pause and just give a shout out to Evan Wallace. Dylan's like an absolute legend. Yeah. I think the stories that people here tell about Evan are just, you know, they'll go on.
Speaker 3:Yep. Chris, who's gonna come on next, you know, is the Figma CTO. He'll, I think, have a lot of he'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base, but allegedly, it's insane. That's great. And
Speaker 2:no. Well well and and and just going like, taking another step back, people have like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your products. And I think most like, almost always when I hear a founder say, well, Figma took four years. I go, well, you're not Evan Wallace in the field. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're not, like, fundamentally changing, you know, the way that, like, software works online. Yeah. You you you're just you're you're building enterprise workflow workflows. You should probably ship, like, next month.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The other thing about the you know, you can take take as long as you need. You know? You know, Figma there's this there's a something that Roloff talks a lot about for our business, which is the red queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
Speaker 3:I think in a world of accelerating technology change, like, in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more. And obviously, like AI is allowing companies to do a lot more.
Speaker 1:Isn't the red queen race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into? Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, that's just the truth of technology, think.
Speaker 1:This is the truth of venture capital and the truth of enterprise software Yeah. Business to business software.
Speaker 5:And if
Speaker 3:you look at how, you know, when Figma went from four products to eight products, I can fig Yeah. Right? Like, the pace and I think everyone who uses the product feels it.
Speaker 4:Like, the
Speaker 3:pace is just picking up.
Speaker 2:Know? We got a little preview of config and and I I messaged Nairi. I was like, wait. All you're you're announcing all of this at config? Like, all all four of these?
Speaker 1:Like, it
Speaker 2:was, like, four major
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Insane. Announcements, and and that's what that's what picking up the pace looks like and, like, finding that new gear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about. There's taking, you know, designers and giving them the ability to ship code. They're kind of this flip from going from a zero x engineer, a designer to a one x engineer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that gain can sometimes be better than taking a 10 x engineer and making them a little bit better. Yeah. Can just unlock this new capability. How are you thinking about companies just broadly thinking about AI as a as a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company?
Speaker 1:What what what are you hearing? What are seeing?
Speaker 3:I've been thinking about that question a lot. Yeah. You know, the way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored in a meeting. I think similarly, all of us are gonna be capable of creating something on the Internet.
Speaker 1:It's actually interactive. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. And I think that has been happening for a while. Sure. I think it's picking up steam in an incredible pace. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think this role of creative technologist, I think, you know, in big companies, you'll still probably have siloed engineering, product design Sure. You know, marketing teams. I think in our small companies, the like founding the founding engineers, founding teams, people are wearing a lot of hats Yep. Right, and using tools like Figma to do everything from ideation to prompt something to iterate, get in the hands of users, and to actually, you know, publish code. I think that the small companies, I bet we'll leave them at.
Speaker 2:My buddy Andreessen said that when I was first pitching them, we we weren't, like, actually raising it. I didn't have a deck. And so I just was in Figma screen sharing, showing them the the product and showing them all the different ways that we were gonna take it and things like that. And it it it just and and again, that that that's just like evidence of Figma not being for designers. No.
Speaker 2:Never thought. I thought it was a tool for building things.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One dynamic Ben Thompson has been talking about is that as a public company, sometimes it can be easier to do m and a. Have you ever run into that in your career just broadly of a company that where that is an important factor in kind of their long term strategy. I've always I've I've generally, the meme has been, like, stay private as long as possible, but, you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits, but what what are the what is the M and A dynamic in public and private markets right now?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think the you know, there's what you learn when you start out at Goldman Sachs. And it's, you know, it's you have access to the capital markets. Sure. If you need a public currency for M and A, you know, blah blah blah.
Speaker 3:You tell your story. For me, the the the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago and just, like, feeling the energy. You guys were there. You felt the energy amongst the community. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, the incredible community surrounding Figma. And then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the the broader world. Yeah. You know, in the s one we reported, I think 13,000,000 monthly active users, two thirds of which are not designers. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And,
Speaker 2:you know, they got Did you you know did you did you was that was that your guess early on? Did you did you did you fully see that the that the TAM for this was not like how many designers are there and just like add it up and multiply it. Did did you I imagine you believe that it could be used across
Speaker 1:The TAM expanded.
Speaker 3:It's it's it's similar to what I was saying with the, you know, I think the creative technologist archetype who's gonna do a lot of things and eventually in ten years the way that companies run their product engineering things will probably look very different. I think similarly, like, there were worse there were even, you know, predating our investment. There were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the Figma way, collaborative way of building products. And you had, you know, full product engineering design teams at small companies or even at mid sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio, and we talked to them before we invested.
Speaker 3:And they were, you know, early at Yeah. Pioneering this. You know, we're getting off of the Dropbox links being sent around. We're, you know, we're going all in on on, you know, working in Figma. And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly.
Speaker 3:And therefore, the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years. Yeah. I think similarly, some small companies are gonna pioneer new ways of doing things. They're gonna move really fast. It's gonna be obvious that there's like a new archetype emerging.
Speaker 3:I think many of those people are gonna live in Figma. I think the most creative community on the Internet today already exists in Figma.
Speaker 2:I I always it it it felt even I remember using it as a like, a social app. Like, in the sense that, like, I would get I would it'd be late at night. I would open my laptop, and I'd be like, oh, Brandon's up. And I'd go over to wherever he was designing. I'd be like, hey.
Speaker 2:What's up, dude? I just type a comment. Yeah. And it was like this, like it was, like, almost Chatting. A lot of people built these in these, like, virtual offices, but, like, Tigma was our virtual
Speaker 1:office. That's interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where I'd just be like, hey, what's up? Or I'd just, like, start you know, I'd just mess with them and, like, move changing button colors.
Speaker 3:Yeah. The one thing I'm really excited about with the new products is, you know, they're both raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in Figma, you know, like with like the Madraw for instance. Right? Like the ability to do like really interesting artistic creative work inside of Figma files and also massively raising the floor for those of us who are, you know, more Excel inclined Sure. In our, you know, creative abilities.
Speaker 2:Excel coded.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And I think it's so rare to find like technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Usually, there's a trade off.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And Yeah. It's really exciting.
Speaker 1:I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose, but it was decades ago. Right?
Speaker 3:Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and it's and similarly to the idea of, you know, Figma slides came out of this intuition or not intuition, just the reality that many people were torquing Figma files in the slide decks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I had a a I I I had a file called deck formatting Yeah. That I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of like, this is how I build decks.
Speaker 8:Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is how I build fundraising decks. Here's like, you know, 50 examples for each page. And I would just send it out to everyone. They could just copy it and start working off of it. Okay.
Speaker 2:I mean, that sounds good. Yeah. It's great. I I I we don't we don't have to make many decks at
Speaker 1:We really do. No. We we should make one. We should
Speaker 2:start making more decks just for each other.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should. Yeah. It'd be great. Last question.
Speaker 1:I think we'll let you go. I I wanna talk about the culture and and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that. How do you describe culture of like someone who's a good fit to become a fig mate?
Speaker 3:Oh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting
Speaker 2:As the series c lead. Yeah.
Speaker 3:When I was reflecting on what I was going to tweet today Yeah. You know, because there's always a fine balance. Right? Like, how do I tweet something to say congrats Yes. Without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing event?
Speaker 3:You Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Kinda went into a very paranoid headspace of how do I get, you know, not end up in the
Speaker 1:Just oh, just wrong button. Just go too far. Just you're welcome, everyone. We said We
Speaker 2:are Congrats to the incredible Figma team, the most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of people. I'm just so happy for all of your success.
Speaker 1:There we go. And I
Speaker 2:was I almost responded, our success.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So those those four adjectives, I think they are Okay. Yeah. They are creative.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think I I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at config about how everybody everybody who was at config would be a good tattoo artist for my my
Speaker 1:Oh, sure. Face painting artist
Speaker 3:for my daughter and my brother said that was that analogy did not lay out. So they're they're very creative. I think they're extremely determined.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think like this is a company that, you know, when Yeah. The early days of burning however much money they were burning a month not having pocket market fit and grinding your way to pocket market fit, and all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really Yeah. Started their Ascent.
Speaker 1:But you still have like the hardcore WebGL crew. Yeah. And it And that's like all it's not like quite like foundation model
Speaker 4:It's a company
Speaker 1:AI research. But it's like serious engineering.
Speaker 3:It's a company that does hard things.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:They are not afraid of doing really hard things.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 3:I think they're imaginative. I think that's like, you know, the make believe billboard you see in San Francisco. It's a company that really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology and they're positive. Like, they are just good human beings and, you know, looking at obviously the reaction to the Yeah.
Speaker 3:To the IPO is just I look around, like, these are awesome people who are so cool. The valedictorian of my high school works at Figma.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 3:Her name's Katie Zito. She's Amazing.
Speaker 2:A legend.
Speaker 3:A PM here. She's Yeah. Literally, like, the smartest person I knew in high school and
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:You know, now she builds products at Figma and
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 3:Anyway. I'm just so happy with that. I really am happy for their success and your success.
Speaker 2:Yes. We had we had I didn't put it out, but yesterday we did the we did it meme with Ramp. It was like every every person involved.
Speaker 1:I sent you that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was great. And now
Speaker 3:we're But now Ramps congratulating Figma with the big billboard today or the
Speaker 2:big No. That was in Banners.
Speaker 8:So you
Speaker 2:know they had that idea Monday. Yeah. On the phone with them, they're
Speaker 7:like, yeah.
Speaker 2:We think we might get a banner and, like, hang because we're our office is right across the street from Figma's New York office. We should just hang it out. And it's like this, later. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's be great.
Speaker 2:Congratulations on your success.
Speaker 3:Congratulations. We'll
Speaker 1:talk to you soon. Let's bring in our next guest to the studio. We are gonna tweak some cameras. Kramer. Give you an update.
Speaker 1:What does he say?
Speaker 2:Celebrate the moment.
Speaker 1:Celebrate the moment. Says Jim Kramer.
Speaker 2:Certainly are.
Speaker 1:And we are at one zero one fifty four and it's getting quieter. The the the the folks of the the Citadel Securities It's a
Speaker 2:point that nobody's manually executing trades.
Speaker 1:Also didn't see single crowd surfing event happen. Man, I guys.
Speaker 2:On a topic.
Speaker 1:Good to meet you.
Speaker 4:Good to
Speaker 1:meet you. Where should we start? But please introduce yourself for the stream. Let people know who you are.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I'm Chris Rasmussen. I'm the CTO at Figma.
Speaker 1:Great. Well, take us a little bit through your journey with the company. When did you join? What have you been working on? All that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's amazing to have, like, a barely a two sentence, you know, intro that just tells everything you need to really know. Took a lot to get there. Yeah.
Speaker 5:It's a lot easier now, though. It wasn't the beginning to to explain it. But no. Yeah. I joined Figma through a roundabout means.
Speaker 5:I actually started off as a contractor with the company. So wow. For the first eight months, I was just writing code, hoping to get the product launched publicly, and then working from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I think the thing that stood out to me back then was just, like, how incredible the team was. Yeah. It was this insanely high aptitude team. That's probably the first time in my career I felt old. Yep.
Speaker 5:And yet I felt like everyone around me was just like some of the most gifted people I had a chance to work with. And the thing that like really sold me on the company Yeah. Was just how much people were trying to lift each other up rather than compete with one another. I think, you know, when you have these really fast growing startups, everyone's ambitious, everyone's hungry Yeah. And that's great.
Speaker 5:But I think it's really important to remember that, you know, you're not trying to drive towards an end state. You're trying to build something that's lasting.
Speaker 1:Does that culture just come from, like, four years in the trenches not being, like, you know, being a quiet company and kind of building in, like, this monastery almost is, the vibe that I get from, like, the early days. And then Yeah. You kind of carry that through as opposed to the first six months are insane, and then you're, like, ups and downs.
Speaker 2:Sarah Sarah Guo said that the company was leading up to the launch, the company was burning, like, $800,000 a month and didn't have a product really out in the wild. But I have to imagine you you were using were you guys how early were you able to dog food the product and, like, build that conviction that, hey, we've actually built something really magical here.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So I I I started working with Figma about a month before the public launch. So there was a lot of work that had already been done. I think there was a time when people thought that, you know, everything just had to take six months and if it took any longer Yep. You know, wasn't interesting.
Speaker 5:But, you know, hard things take time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I think it's a testament to the culture of the company and to Dylan to really persevere and push through that time and bring something to the market that hadn't existed before.
Speaker 1:So so were you brought in for specific WebGL experience, or was WebGL at the focus of what you did, or was there were there other challenges? Because the the whole, like, the whole story kinda collapsed to, like, oh, they just picked WebGL, and, like, that was the key innovation, but I'm sure there was a ton of other stuff going on.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. WebGL was was the technology that enabled us to do graphics, like custom graphics in the browser and bypass some of the traditional browser graphics stack. Think I was brought in because I had this really weird intersection of things that aligned with the company. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:So I used to work at a company called Asana and I built a lot of their real time kind of real time collaboration Yeah. Infrastructure which relates to the multiplayer stuff that we've been working on at Figma. And then funny enough, I I had been taking a sabbatical. So the reason I got introduced to Figma is because I was working on a a side project. It was just a passion project.
Speaker 5:And in my case, was writing a game engine to simulate surfing because I'm a surfer and I
Speaker 1:think I'm
Speaker 5:the only person stubborn enough to work on that long enough.
Speaker 1:You're solving Navier strokes? Like, what is is the that like the hardest game?
Speaker 2:There there was
Speaker 1:one Fluid surfing.
Speaker 2:Was one browser surfing game that I used to play as a kid because I'm a surfer too. Yeah. It's it's funny you bring up Asana too because, like, as when I when I look back at, like, the real, like, start of my career, was it like I was quickly invited to Asana, and I felt like such an adult. I was like, oh, look at me. I've got this, you know, very cutting edge, you know, prod project management tool.
Speaker 2:And then very quickly after that, was invited to Figma. And then ever since then, I've used the product every every single day.
Speaker 5:That's amazing. We're we're following the same path as
Speaker 3:them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. So yeah. What what what else were the technical challenges going on to release?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, so I mean, first off, it's just not easy. I think a lot of people, like, when they first looked at Figma back then, they were thinking, oh, a design tool, a single player tool. But under the hood, Figma is this real time multiplayer engine.
Speaker 1:And it had to be multiplayer from day one.
Speaker 5:Yes. Because I think, like, the the opportunity back then and the opportunity still today is not just to make a designer more efficient and more effective. It's also to bring the team closer together
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:To enable the best ideas to surface to the front and to help them align and ship and execute those ideas.
Speaker 2:And I was I was I was saying to Andrew right before you jumped on the for me, Figma was a social product in the COVID air times because I would jump on. I'd open my laptop. Yeah. My my son would would go to bed. He was just, like, six months old or something like that.
Speaker 2:I'd open up Figma, I'd see a couple other people on the team, like, in in the main, like, you know, file that we had. And I would just pop over their cursor and be, like, you know, in the in the comments being like, hey. What's up? I didn't realize you were up still. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and it it felt like a virtual office for the team at a time when there was, like, no there was not much social activity at all.
Speaker 5:Totally. Yeah. I I think it's really important to make work fun and to, you know again, it comes back to lifting each other up. We're all trying to kinda surface ideas and put things out there, and it it's a lot more fun when you get to deal with your team. One of my favorite memories from the pandemic was actually this time when Slack went down.
Speaker 5:Sure. So Slack went down as, like, the middle of the
Speaker 2:go down that much, but you remember when it goes down.
Speaker 5:You do remember when it goes down. We use it too. We're we're big fans of Slack. But when it went down, we found out that a bunch of people were actually recreating the Slack UI inside of Figma and then using our multiplayer functionality to chat on the canvas. It's just a super
Speaker 1:cool move. That's wild. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's wild.
Speaker 1:Do you think that adding multiplayer features after launch would have been if you play out, like, the counterfactual, would that have been much more technically challenging, you think? I think it's like there's something of this special about
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From day one, this is baked in.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think there's there's two sides to this problem.
Speaker 1:So the
Speaker 5:first is just getting the base technology in place. That's one problem. The other thing is actually rethinking all of the product features
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 5:So that they are actually eventually consistent and you're not stepping on each other's toes and dealing with conflicts. And so a big part of building, you know, collaborative multiplayer software is actually reasoning about how you design features so they compose elegantly when multiple people are doing things at the same time. Yeah. And that's really hard to bolt on later. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. The thing that makes it so powerful in in in my own words is if you have no matter how talented an individual like designer, engineer, product person, founder is, no matter how much of a visionary they are, no matter how capable they are, the whatever idea they initially have for something will be better once it has like the input of a group of people. And so the the the the prehistoric era when design tools were built for like designers and like no one else would even have the file necessarily. It's just so wild to think back because I think like every every great feature I've ever made, every great ad I've ever made, every great website was always like this combination of a bunch of smart people coming together and all contributing. And then Figma makes it so that it's as simple of like, even if you're not in the same room.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, I I think about how much progress would have been lost if you didn't have something like Figma during COVID where if you were used to as a team working and, like, all working on the same, you know, feature and being able to be there in person, it it it just made it so seamless to recreate that and actually build great things.
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. I couldn't agree more. I I I think the other aspect of design that sometimes people mistake it for is they think it's just about building like a static mock or a single image. Sure.
Speaker 5:And I think the reality is, like, the best design products, people sweat the details all the way to production. So you're not just thinking about, you know, how is it gonna look in a few key states. You're thinking about how is that gonna work, what's the system behind the design, you know, and how are gonna make it perform and efficient, and how are you gonna learn from that and keep iterating. And so it's a really broad space and super excited to be playing in it.
Speaker 2:What was the lead up to config like? You guys came out the gates with what, four major new product areas it felt like. And I remember Nairi gave me a little preview of what you guys were announcing and I was like, really? Like, four? Imagine it was pretty stressful for you, but you guys pulled it off?
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. We we the team pulled it off to their credit. It was incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We went from, like, four to eight products all in one config, which is really cool. And it was even cooler because I was on parental leave for the first month config. So I was just so stoked to come back from my my short little parental leave and see that this team had just cranked everything out and and done such an incredible job.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about AI. Obviously, are AI enabled, you know, products. But then I imagine that AI is starting to infuse both in the internal workflows and also the sub features within products that exist already. And I'm I'm wondering how you think about organizational design, how you think about letting the existing team run with just adding on features and tools that leverage AI to setting up new teams.
Speaker 1:And do you need a do you need a crack team that goes around and AI if eyes everything? Or is this just another tool in the tool chest that everyone can be pulling from regardless of where they sit in the org?
Speaker 5:Yeah. No. It's a it's a good question. We've been we've been kinda sweating that question ourselves. But I think it it really comes back to what we've been doing all along for us.
Speaker 5:So at Figma, like, we started, the goal was to make designers more efficient and give them superpowers, if you will, so they can do, you know, more and, you know, bring the best ideas to life. And then also to enable them to collaborate more seamlessly and effortlessly with their team
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and make that whole process more accessible to their team as well. Yeah. And I think AI is just this incredible tailwind and accelerant to all of that right now. It's like not hard to imagine the ways in which, you know, designers are using AI in the context of Figma, for example, with Figma bake Yep. To not just like, you know, build a prototype, but actually breathe life into that prototype with prototyping and ship it all the way to production.
Speaker 5:Yeah. At the same time, you know, all of these technologies are making the entire product suite that we have much more accessible to the people around them. And so, you know, people can come into Figma and they can prompt themselves to get started, but then they still have the full power of the Figma ecosystem. So, you know, when when the prompting is no longer the most efficient way, they can just grab the mouse and, you know, grab that color wheel and find that perfect red color rather than trying to just Final touch. Yeah.
Speaker 5:The final touch. So yeah. It's super exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Last question. I think we have someone else coming on in a second. Talk about the the engineering culture. Thing was so interesting because I think every I don't wanna generalize too much, but it feels like everyone has some design chops or at least taste or or cares about design.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, you have those deep WebGL roots. It feels like there's some pretty serious hardcore technologists in the organization. What's the blend? What is that like when those two orgs come together? I imagine that you've spent a decade integrating those two disciplines.
Speaker 1:But culturally, what does it take to really succeed at the company?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think it takes like intellectual curiosity. Right? That's what we seek out in our hires. Like, we're trying to find people who are just as passionate as we are about making things better, which really serves our customers too because that's exactly what we're trying to help them do.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You know, I think that we have like these incredible designers who also know how to code and we have these incredible systems architects who have really really good product sense as well. Yep. And I think it's this like kinda role blending that we've embraced as a culture and we're starting to see, you know, with AI breaking down some of the learning barriers between these functions, other companies embrace as well.
Speaker 1:Yep. Last question.
Speaker 2:Andrew Reed says that Evan Wallace had some crazy contributions to the code base early on. Any any any standout highlights in your
Speaker 5:mind? Evan is just an incredibly gifted engineer. And the thing I remember is actually even before I joined Figma, when I was working on my own little game engine, I was reading these articles online about how to do constructive solid geometry and and, know, all these mathematical things. And I was reading these tutorials. And then when I started working with Evan at Figma, he he's like, I I went to his personal website and I realized the articles I was reading were written by him.
Speaker 5:Like, he's just he's a he's a super gifted person. It's really really an honor to have worked with him.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. Congratulations to everyone. Incredible journey to date just getting started. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for hopping on stream. Great meeting. Appreciate it. Congratulations. Water.
Speaker 1:Good place. See you soon. And we are ready for our next guest on this Figma stream. TBPN is live from the New York Stock Exchange. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:How you doing? Jordan, thank Pleasure to meet you.
Speaker 2:It's awesome to meet you.
Speaker 1:I've always heard great things. It's such a pleasure to meet you in person. Would you mind just doing a quick introduction for the folks who might not
Speaker 7:be familiar? So I'm Danny Reimer. I'm with Index Ventures.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 7:And, we're a firm that's based in London, San Francisco, and New York. Yes. We are investing early in growth stage. And, we invested in Figma. We led the seed round in Figma.
Speaker 7:So met met Dylan when he was 18 for the first time, which is pretty amazing. I'm I'm now going down, you know, Melancholy Hill as I'm Nostalgia Hill as I'm hearing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what I I have to ask right away. What how did you react early on to to to their kind of launch timeline? Right? Like, the thing that keeps coming up today, and we talked with Andrew Reed about this earlier.
Speaker 2:Personally, as an angel, if somebody tells me they're building a software company for other businesses and they say that it's gonna we're gonna launch in two years. I almost immediately think like, okay, this person probably needs to like update their thinking, but Yeah. And and I think people generally use a Figma example of like this fat MVP and can it be a trap because you can work on something for a long time and have it not not really be that valuable. But I I wonder what your immediate reaction was given that this was, you know, well before the launch.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I mean, believe it or not, it's sort of in line with our contrarian approach. Like, we we're contrarian on a bunch of stuff. We've been really, you know, bearish on crypto. We didn't do any crypto investments.
Speaker 7:So for us, it was a feature, not a bug that it was gonna take that long.
Speaker 2:Contrarian about being loud too, you know, on Figma. A lot of people, I think they saw, like, you know, Index's ownership, at at the IPO and and didn't you know, you guys haven't posting threads every single day. Well, that's see, it's about team. Culture. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's about the team. But bearish
Speaker 1:on crypto, how how'd you react to Dylan's NFT profile picture?
Speaker 7:I think it's a god
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. It makes sense. Right. He's got the prize.
Speaker 1:He's got prize. Doesn't mean
Speaker 7:that he can't be.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But he's biggest.
Speaker 7:But, you know, really, at the time
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:You know, all of the technology, all the software was sort of, like, in that meta spirit, that Facebook spirit of, like, throw it against a wall, you know, ship quickly, doesn't matter if it's broken, break in
Speaker 2:Build fast and break things.
Speaker 7:Build fronts, break things. And this was so contrary. It's like the the two guys were contrarian and they were committed to actually developing things for two years before we were gonna have any sense as to whether it was gonna be good or not. And it really had to compete against Sketch was the primary competitor.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And Sketch was a damn good product. Love the product. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Which is like the hard you know, even even, you know, most investors, if they're looking at a new investment in a category with a very well loved product that has massive saturation, I mean, I don't I think it would be hard to find a product designer in San Francisco pre Figma that wasn't using Sketch.
Speaker 7:Yeah. You're absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Do you remember what the other comps were from that era of companies that had figured out how to do something utilitarian, but then bolted on a multiplayer aspect. We were kind of kicking around the obvious example of, like, Instagram. There were a few other photo filtering apps, but Instagram started with the social network out of the box, kind of bootstrapped it in the background, and wound up being very successful product, obviously. But were there other companies that were coming to mind at that time?
Speaker 7:So we're big game investors.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 7:Right? So first of all, multiplayer was a term that we were very familiar with.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 7:And then we were Dropbox investors.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 7:So, like, the notion of sort of the product, the consumerization of the enterprise, starting small, growing through, you know, guerilla tactics and just mainstream adoption within the organization, we felt really com comfortable with.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Is that is that broadly product led growth or is product led growth in your mind, a broader term?
Speaker 7:No. That's it's it is PLG. Just PLG. Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 7:And it was it it was clear back to the you're I totally agree with you. The lion's share of folks were using Dropbox and Sketch. Yeah. And so for us, the we knew what the problem was. Like, the first time I met Dylan was at Flipboard when he was 18.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And they had amazing designers at Flipboard. And I just remember the confusion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Beautiful product. Beautiful.
Speaker 1:Like, and and also, I don't know if it was WebGL, but the three d animation of the page flipping.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. And you can
Speaker 1:see that that comes through with, like, okay. Just the just the technical challenge of, how would I implement that? I remember playing with it on the iPad and being, okay. This is a different thing.
Speaker 2:This is the same code.
Speaker 7:I mean, they they launched it before the iPad was launched.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:That's
Speaker 7:right. But the the versioning headaches that they were getting through, like, you know, they had all these amazing Sure. Designers. One ended up leading design at Uber, Another one Mhmm. And is one of the senior designers at Apple for
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7:For, like, eight years. And the design problems that they would get into of, like, sending the wrong version, sending the wrong asset
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 7:You know Yeah. Through Dropbox, it was clear that you needed a better solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are you seeing broadly in terms of artificial intelligence as a sustaining or disruptive innovation, to companies that have established a market, and then there's a whole bunch of companies that are coming in and saying, like, we're gonna be the AI version of that. It feels like in some ways you could say, oh, well, that's just like the multiplayer version, but in some ways it's more of a sustaining innovation. What's your broad take?
Speaker 7:I would say the latter. Sustaining innovation. I mean, I'm super bullish about AI. I I'm sure. It's hard not to be.
Speaker 7:Right?
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. You probably qualify that. Like, bullish on AI doesn't necessarily mean you're, like, upset about what's happening at, you know, the Foundation Model Labs or in terms of CapEx or NVIDIA. Like, there's a million different places.
Speaker 2:But But You're sort of broadly bullish.
Speaker 7:You know, our our our job is to see a trend
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And then to analyze a trend and then to go pretty deep.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And we are very bullish on AI.
Speaker 2:Very bullish. Like every other time I see a Yeah. A billion dollar m and a headline, it's another index always set up with the most asset. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:The the thing that strikes me about Figma that I think is still powerful to this day is the the this simultaneously, like, the complexity of the product and the simplicity of the product. If you land if you get invited to Figma and you've never used the product before, just get dropped in to the canvas, you're there. You can see the other people. And despite all that you can do with the product, it's still I just found it like somehow intuitive even for somebody. And I and I think that's, yeah, very very difficult.
Speaker 7:Yeah. And, you know, the the cofounder, you know, Dylan was brilliant enough to hire as cofounder the best computer scientist he had ever met Yeah. Who was, you know, his TA at Brown. Right? Like, convinced him to stop doing a PhD and to code.
Speaker 7:Wow. That guy had such an understanding of that. Yeah. Or it still does. Evan.
Speaker 1:Evan.
Speaker 7:Still has a such a clear understanding of how to create the lowest common denominator and make it inclusive with everyone while also because it's designed and design is gonna become central to everything, have enough sophistication so that you can differentiate from anyone else.
Speaker 2:Yep. No. It's really it's really amazing to me the magic of Figma and the thing that I I from the very first Figma that I was invited to and that and that was obviously why that the growth was so insane early is it's like natural product led growth versus forced Yeah. Product led growth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Was this a bill you know, as a user, if you can if if the thing that you provide a customer or user is the ability to take the thing that's in their mind and make it real so they can see it. That's like the most magic thing ever. And the the other thing I would comp kind of this moment too is, you know, we we cover alphabet and Google a lot and we talk about how Google's initial mission to like organize the world's information and, you know, make it useful. I I forget exactly how they position it. And how that's so aligned to Gen AI in the sense that a lot of what LMs do today is just make organizing information for you and making it useful.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. It's like the core of the value. And it feels like Figma of this core of like taking a spark of an idea and making it and do a thing is so aligned with generative AI because it's like, oh, you wanna make a website? Like, describe it.
Speaker 2:You wanna make an app? Describe it. You wanna change the details? You wanna change this color? You wanna Yeah.
Speaker 2:You wanna build like an entire, you know, app underneath the website? It it's
Speaker 7:just I think
Speaker 2:all there and reducing that time from spark of an idea to like real product.
Speaker 7:That's right. It's just And I think it it is a really important component and making sure that the human intervention is critical for differentiation. Right? Like, you need that in order like, the idea has to first manifest, but you can do that with AI tools. But then, it has to have a human differentiation, like Yeah.
Speaker 7:A human intervention that makes it way better to use.
Speaker 2:And this is the same this is the same way that making things in an organization work. You might have the smartest person on a team, have an amazing idea Right. And get it get it here. And then and then the intern might throw in, hey, by the way, what if we did it like this? And everybody like, oh, that's good idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And even with, like, super intelligence or whatever we're hurling towards, it's like, you know, you can you might be able to create a v one, but it's it's this combination of ideas and experiences that makes it truly Yeah. Special.
Speaker 1:Last question. Give me the update on index. It's a huge fund growing. What's the contrarian strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. How are rumors. Are we
Speaker 1:gonna see you out there soon? Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 2:Where are
Speaker 1:you gonna see public funds?
Speaker 7:I guess our contrarian element has been not to grow Okay. Enormously. Yeah. So, you know, we've had a billion dollar venture fund and $2,000,000,000 growth fund
Speaker 6:Yep.
Speaker 7:For a decade now, and we haven't expanded our size. So, like, the idea is that from our perspective, investing is a craft. Mhmm. And if we get bigger, we might lose the focus. Yep.
Speaker 7:And we're not gonna be able to have the same relationship with the founders that we that we adore having.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:So we just have to generate the returns. So that's what we're focused on, like keeping it small and and hopefully I mean, you know, I have I have some amazing partners Yeah. Who How big is this team now? We're we are we're seven investing partners.
Speaker 1:Seven partners.
Speaker 7:And yeah. And what's cool is that Craft. You know, like, Shardul is behind Wiz for us.
Speaker 5:Sure.
Speaker 7:And we have Dream Games. Yeah. And we have ServiceTitan.
Speaker 1:And so it's a Pretty cool. Mentorship business?
Speaker 7:Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's that's what excites us Yeah. Is that the next generation
Speaker 1:You already are better
Speaker 7:are better than the current generation.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, thank you so much for coming. It was fantastic.
Speaker 5:Thank love
Speaker 1:to have you back on the show soon.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Pleasure. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 1:I'll the phone. I'll take the microphone. And we will bring in our next guest. Jordy, do you have any updates from the timeline? What else is going on?
Speaker 1:We have Mamun. Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Stream.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that pin.
Speaker 2:That pin is fantastic.
Speaker 1:We're gonna have you happy on the show. Yes. I'm
Speaker 6:so fired up to be here.
Speaker 1:It's so fun. Perfect timing. Give us a little introduction on yourself and what you do.
Speaker 6:Alright. Well, I'm a partner at Kleiner Perkins, early stage venture capitalist. Yes. Kleiner Perkins, the firm has been around for fifty plus years in amazing companies like Google and Amazon and Netscape and Figma
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 6:Of course. And, yeah, we invest in early stage companies, but we also have a growth fund Yes. Then invest in some pretty cool later stage opportunities as well.
Speaker 1:And what what is the the story of meeting Dylan and Figma? When did that come together?
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think I met
Speaker 2:him You guys did the b.
Speaker 6:We did the b. Yeah. And that was in 02/2017. Yeah. I met Dylan probably in 02/2017, early in '17.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:I was on a board with John Lilly who led the series a.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. We read his blog post today.
Speaker 2:And John
Speaker 6:and I were involved with the company. It didn't really work out. Okay. And he he he told me at the time that, hey, this thing may not work out. So I owe you one.
Speaker 6:I'm gonna introduce you to
Speaker 1:this guy. Okay.
Speaker 6:Dylan. Yeah. And you're gonna love him. And by the way, like your background in Box and Yammer and Slack
Speaker 4:could help.
Speaker 6:Yeah. And so spend time together, get to know each
Speaker 1:other Yep.
Speaker 6:Which we did over a bunch of month months. And we really hit it off. And later that year, Dylan decided to raise a series b. And this is around the time when the the product had just come out of beta. Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And you could you'd you'd hear people talking about Figma. And, you know, the company had been around for five years. So this is a long wind up.
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 6:And it was coming out of beta, just started to monetize a few customers. And you'd walk around actually South Park where Yeah. We were based, and you see people in coffee shops, the designer
Speaker 1:teams times.
Speaker 6:Using Figma. Interesting. Just like three, four, five years prior, you'd see Slack
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:On people's screens. And so, okay. There's something going on. And then when I saw my my friend Josh Williams, who's a designer, incredible designer, it's like, oh, Josh is using it. That means that the designer community has really latched on
Speaker 1:to Yeah. Figma.
Speaker 6:And so took a few tidbits, data points, and and then I remember asking Dylan, like, show me this one chart. All I need to see is one chart. Mhmm. It's called the l 28. Yeah.
Speaker 6:It's the the usage for the whole user base over a twenty eight day period of time. It's a histogram. It's nerdy, but Dylan, just go go look at this data and tell me what it looks like. So he sent it over and it had this little little smile and which effectively shows that at day fourteen, fifteen, 16 out of twenty eight days, many of the users were using it for, like, every day of the work week, which meant that effectively, if you're a designer, you are using Figma to get your work done. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And there's just no question about it.
Speaker 2:By way, I'm a non designer and I I kind of came online in the work in the work world startup startup game in 2017 and I was very quickly a DAU. Like, I use it all the time as a as somebody that didn't consider myself a designer. I was just invited to Figma. I was like, wait, this is a pretty good way to just do a lot of different types of work, whether you're making a deck or marketing assets or website or any anything. So
Speaker 6:Totally. And and that's you you saw that, you know, I think the the first board deck I think I I forgot was actually in Figma. So and Figma slides wasn't a product that that we Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just launched actually.
Speaker 6:So so yeah. You saw this like incredible depth of engagement with the product that I I'd seen with products like Slack. And obviously like Slack we all use and we love Yeah. Some hate, but mostly love. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 2:Of course.
Speaker 6:And and you saw that early
Speaker 2:people feel about it. They still use it.
Speaker 1:So yeah. Yeah. L l l 28, that's effectively like a churn analysis, but short term?
Speaker 2:It's usage over first twenty
Speaker 1:eight days. You should see
Speaker 6:some trial coverage. Twenty eight day period. Okay. It's actually just a take any user, like the the whole user base.
Speaker 1:The whole cohort.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Like, let's say a thousand users.
Speaker 1:Okay. So random slice. They could have been installed months ago. Yeah. But you wanna see how they use it?
Speaker 6:Every person who who signed up, let's say
Speaker 5:Got it.
Speaker 6:A thousand users. Yep. And did they use it for that once a month, twice
Speaker 1:a month
Speaker 6:Oh. Three times a
Speaker 1:month Okay.
Speaker 6:Okay. Or 28 times a
Speaker 1:like twenty eight days out of month. Okay. Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 6:So then you saw the tick up, like the smile curve.
Speaker 4:It's like
Speaker 6:and only consumer companies typically look at that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to see that sort of behavior out of a Yep.
Speaker 6:Enterprise software product Yep. Was incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of the analysis I saw was rule of 40. People were talking about how Figma's in a great position right now. Great margins, but also great growth rate. Add that together.
Speaker 1:That's the rule of 40. When did the Rule of 40 come into your world? What did it factor into the series b, or was it something you started tracking later? What can you tell me?
Speaker 2:Think just the cafe analysis.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Go do it.
Speaker 8:I think
Speaker 1:it was enough.
Speaker 6:Real, later. Actually, funny enough, I think about ten years ago, came up with this thing called a quick ratio
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:Which was more interesting to me because that
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:For early stage companies that showed, a quick ratio is effectively in a given month, how much how many users did you add? Yep. And how many users did you churn?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 6:So let's say you added 400 users Yep. And you churned a 100
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 6:Your quick ratio is four. Yep. And that was actually like a good number.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:But if you're adding 200 and losing a 150, not good.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? That's a leaky bucket.
Speaker 1:It's a leaky bucket.
Speaker 6:Yep. So for an early stage person, the the quick ratio was just way better than
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:Looking at growth rate and then looking at the
Speaker 1:Mortations which could be all over the place Yeah. Based on what they did that month or that quarter. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:One question I have, I'm I'm curious how you see it. So it was Index, Greylock, KP, Sequoia, a sixteen z were were the leads. If this company if Figma had been started in 2020, do you think there would have been one or two funds just like going back and forth? Was it was it was it you know, I I feel like today you you'll see these like fast fast follow
Speaker 1:around Concentration seems to be a real focus for a lot of funds.
Speaker 2:And and was that something you think that like Dylan was just pushing for? Wanted a a a diverse board, or or was it more, just the state of venture at that time?
Speaker 6:I think Dylan is just very nuanced and detail oriented and very methodical. And every round he had in his mind who was the investor the right investor for me at this point in time, which is how I think he even sought out this our relationship
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Where John, Lily, and Dylan was telling me downstairs, you know, you know we sought you out for that series b was like a a beeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And I think Dylan had that same sentiment towards the series c with Andrew Reed who was just on. Right? Yeah. And then even the round thereafter. Thereafter.
Speaker 6:So he was always in his mind had his, this is the the the person, the firm that I really wanna work with based on their skill set, their capabilities. And he went after it and he got
Speaker 1:it Yeah.
Speaker 6:Every single time.
Speaker 1:How do you think the board evolved? It seems like there's a lot of different investors, different firms joining. How do you think the board will evolve going forward? And it already has evolved. Can you talk to some of the additions and what the rationale was behind those?
Speaker 6:Yeah. So we just in the last month, we've we've added three incredible people. Yeah. Bill McDermott. Yeah.
Speaker 2:OG. Right?
Speaker 6:Like, OG. You you have to have Bill on the show
Speaker 1:if you haven't. Oh, no. We'd to. Oh my god.
Speaker 6:Bill's the man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously, he he runs ServiceNow. Yep.
Speaker 6:Before that, he ran SAP.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 6:So he he's just the the CEO of all like,
Speaker 3:the the GOAT Yeah.
Speaker 6:In terms of, like, running an enterprise software business. Yep. And we added Mike Krueger
Speaker 1:Mike Krueger.
Speaker 6:Founder of Instagram. Come on, guys.
Speaker 1:And and a and a very interesting yeah. Yeah. I mean, Anthropic too.
Speaker 6:Anthropic now, chief product officer at Anthropic. He he was downstairs. Yeah. And then we added Louis Vannan. Louis Vannan, I think, is Yeah.
Speaker 6:From Duolingo. Amazing. Yeah. He's a founder, a CEO, went early in AI
Speaker 5:Yep.
Speaker 6:And you know, running a public company Yep. Also a KP company. So just like three folks who bring different skill sets
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 6:But are just like a plus top notch. And I think that's sort of how Dylan has really built the company from, you know, setting the tone, the culture amongst the team Yeah. His executive team, the board. And it's, you know, he couldn't be more proud of what's been built there.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic.
Speaker 2:When did last question, then we'll I'm sure you have a busy evening. One, when did the kind of Gen AI opportunity click with you and Figma? Was it was it instantly? Was there a specific moment that you realized what an opportunity Figma would have in terms of if you're already helping people turn ideas into real things and products
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Gen AI has an obvious, you know, immediate application there.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think there's the, more of the features that allow you to do things with AI inside of the the canvas of Figma. Yeah. And then there's the what do you what can you do from from prompting to code to design. And I think there's both elements of AI to integrate into the Figma product, we we've done.
Speaker 6:But I think Dylan just being such a so early on technology, but also timing it really right as well Yeah. Was early, but, you know, more recently, you know, we've launched four products and then one product is very heavy on AI, the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Figma Make. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Which goes from prompt to code. Yep. So really just timing matters and I think, you know, Dylan and the team are all over it. And you just had Chris on, and and you have
Speaker 2:millions and millions of DAU weekly active users that are already saying, please give us more.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're ready. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, guys. It's fantastic.
Speaker 4:I'm a
Speaker 1:fan the show.
Speaker 6:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:On sometime soon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Fantastic. I think we're gonna hop on with Dylan right now. Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:There we go. Looking incredibly sharp.
Speaker 1:So much. Fantastic looking suit.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:What do you have there? You have a gaffle. We're gonna ask you to hold this.
Speaker 4:You know, I mean, you just got How
Speaker 2:many times did you ring the bell today?
Speaker 1:Because you open rang the opening bell. Walk me through your day. What what did you actually
Speaker 4:do today?
Speaker 1:Have you gotten any sleep? Are you okay?
Speaker 2:Started. Like, it's okay.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know I don't know if
Speaker 4:you said how
Speaker 1:bad
Speaker 4:bad
Speaker 1:I look? No. No. No. I just know the schedule is is brutal.
Speaker 4:You know, it's intense schedule, but it was a great day. Amazing. And the team was incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And, yeah, the in terms of the gavel, I mean, I just feel like you're holding this thing,
Speaker 1:you know, you
Speaker 4:can do anything.
Speaker 2:Can do anything. So It's a
Speaker 1:powerful gavel.
Speaker 4:It's a powerful gavel. I feel like it's time to make a bunch of product decisions. Yeah. Not sure on what yet.
Speaker 1:Okay. Like,
Speaker 4:you know, just
Speaker 2:Yeah. The gavel will
Speaker 1:still live. Also show you products updates today too. Right? What what what were the highlights?
Speaker 4:I mean, a lot of highlights, but the things that I was super excited about, one was offset vector Sure. Because we've been getting requests from that Yeah. From the start of Figma. Yeah. And then also for dev mode MCP, we made a bunch of improvements.
Speaker 4:And, you know, it's interesting with dev mode MCP. I mean, this is one where the team was like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it's time to release it. And, you know, we kinda did the walk through it.
Speaker 1:This is for MCP servers for AI agents, essentially?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Basically, it lets you translate, you know, designs a code
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And pull it in via MCP.
Speaker 8:Yep.
Speaker 4:And it kind of an extension of our dev mode functionality. And I was nervous Yeah. Because I just felt like we have so much to build out still and we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's been great to see the reception. Yeah. The reception has been really positive. And then today, we made some more improvements to it, but this is just the start. There's a lot more coming on dev
Speaker 1:mode Yeah. We were talking
Speaker 4:and dev MCP.
Speaker 1:We were talking about this earlier, kind of making the argument. I think we both agreed that Figma fits the traditional definition of, like, a platform that was designed that was, I I think, defined by Microsoft. This idea that the value that's created on top of the product is greater than the product the the value that the product captures. But how do you think that's going to change, or what is the shape of it right now? I know that there are we we have friends who run agencies that probably wouldn't exist if Figma did not exist.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they would find a way, but they're like, they have built a whole company and business around it, and they're obviously incredibly synergistic with you.
Speaker 2:How's Every single thing that I've done in my career.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But arguably, Jordy's career is is
Speaker 4:is Like, I
Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever closed, like, even Figma. I always love using it in the browser. Yeah. Yeah. It's just as good.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever closed
Speaker 1:You have the tab open.
Speaker 2:Figma has just been, like, you know, 99.9%, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's your operating system.
Speaker 2:It's yeah.
Speaker 1:It's your operating system.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I love love hearing that, obviously. But, also, I mean, it's it's it's folks like you who are in the product so much every day Mhmm. That give us the best feedback, and we learn from it. And the thing about designers is they are so thoughtful with their feedback.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they really help steer us and really orient us towards the right things to build. And then, know, of course, you gotta also take some bets where everyone's saying one thing and you're gonna do another thing, but or or things that, you know, people aren't thinking about yet. Yeah. So we try to do a mix.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But it's the feedback from designers, I think, is consistently just, like, probably some of the best feedback in the world.
Speaker 1:I saw it. So we're very lucky. Was crazy. Standing room only and standing ovations. It was like Woodstock.
Speaker 1:Woodstock. It was crazy. Yeah. I wanna talk about organizational design in the age of AI. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:How is the org structure changing, if any at all? I imagine that you have your own team of designers and then developers developers and and front end and back end down to hardcore WebGL folks. Right? And there's some sort of, you know, different tiers and different groups and product groups. But how does AI fit in?
Speaker 1:How does it change it? Obviously, with Figma make its its own product team, but then I imagine that there are folks using AI all over the organization. So how do you think about AI playing a role either as a vertical product focus or horizontal slice or support teams? Like, how are you tussling with that?
Speaker 4:I think it's gotta be kind of many things at once. Mhmm. So one dynamic that's always interesting is you have to motivate research by having, you know, great product applications. But also, you know, if you don't have the research done, sometimes people go, I can't build the product application part yet.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And I think you just have to break that chicken and egg. Sure. You have to, you know, motivate by showing here's what's possible. And then you have to also try to break through and find new ways to do research so that you're able to inspire people on the product side. It's just a virtuous loop if you can get it right.
Speaker 4:But the the thing I'd say more broadly on organizations beyond even just Figma
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Is, you know, the core thesis of Figma is like over the last decade, we've had this point of view that as the inputs to software change Mhmm. As more people are creating software, there's just an exponentially more amount of software in the world, then design, craft,
Speaker 2:point of
Speaker 4:view, that's the differentiator. And I think that there's a really interesting dynamic that we're observing. You know, it was like two decades ago, design was lipstick on a pig. Yeah. You know, make it pretty.
Speaker 4:And maybe a decade ago, conversation shifted to, okay, design's how it works. You gotta really think about design through a whole process. And designers were like, yeah, we've always been saying this, but finally everyone else kinda got it. And then now I think it's literally it's how you win or lose.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I think there's if you look at some of the companies that are doing the best, they you know, some many of which have been on your show.
Speaker 1:I familiar. It is my number one complaint between many of the modern products. I wind up making a making a decision not on the foundational technology, but instead on the user experience Exactly. UI, which feels crazy in the age of benchmarks and like something that's so quantifiable. And yet, I find myself making decisions based on the unquantifiable.
Speaker 2:John John Lilly had a had a post earlier congratulating you and the team. He said in a 2003 interview about the iPod, Steve Jobs famously said, design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Mhmm. He said that you just built like around this like core idea from
Speaker 4:but I think it's evolving. I think it's now how you win. Yeah. And the companies that are understanding that, I think are just we're seeing them outperform. And the ones that are sort of like catching up, they're investing a lot Yeah.
Speaker 4:In design. And not just in the design team, in how to get everyone in the organization to be part of the design process.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:And I think this is really interesting for the designers role because designers are the ones who are then gonna have to lead the charge.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's gonna be a lot of power. And we're gonna start seeing so many more designer CEOs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That
Speaker 4:makes sense. So many more design oriented folks who are, you know, leading and shaping directions of the future of software and of companies more broadly because every company is becoming a software company now. Yeah. And I just think that it's it's gonna be quite a shift. I I suspect we're already seeing this a little bit, but, you know, maybe not at the level of magnitude of, you know, Zach throwing these offers at researchers.
Speaker 4:Maybe not. But, like, I think there's a parallel at a different scale
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:On design. Yeah. I think that the design talent wars are heating up.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And people are realizing that they have to get ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really I mean, the the, like, clearest example here is despite how far Gen AI has come and how many new capabilities there are, incredible designers are more in demand than ever. It's like Yes. You guys get hit up all the time. I think there's like few people in my Rolodex that I'm like, these people are truly incredible, but like good luck recruiting them because like they have 50 other offers and and infinite optionality.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about research. You you mentioned doing research in the context of the of of Figma. And I'm interested to know And
Speaker 2:this just dates back to Evan's Evan's work
Speaker 1:before the company. WebGL example. I was thinking about, you know, watching GPT three come GPT four, and kind of understanding capabilities research. Like, walk me through the understanding of, like, how do you think about design translating to tokens and then AI? Like, how do you even test all these new functionalities?
Speaker 1:Like, you can operate on pixels, diffusion models, or tokens, and HTML. There's so many different angles. Like, what does research actually look like in the Figma context?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Without sharing too much Sure. I I think one of the high level framing might be, you know, diffusion models are excellent. Mhmm. And just like, if you look at sort of some of the things that we've seen with diffusion, the results over time, I mean, it it's really felt like more of an exponential.
Speaker 1:Go
Speaker 4:ahead. Obviously, with LMs, whether it be language or toy problems and code and math, I that feels like an exponential.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think that neither is quite the approach for design just yet. I mean, obviously, with LMs Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, we
Speaker 4:use models to generate make outputs and make.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And Figma make, we're super excited about it. I think it's the ideal case because you go from zero to one.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:But we are still in a world where there are constraints. Yep. And to actually get to the point where you're differentiating the output, where you're adding that craft, that point of view Yep. You know, the phonation models don't get you there.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And even if they were to be able to increase quality of visual output, I I think it actually only makes design more powerful.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:Because if you had, you know, five different designers in this room who are experts of their craft and they're all looking at, you know, some wonderfully generated design that was actually very good, which is not maybe where we're at now
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:They probably have five different points of view. And if that's how you're gonna stand out is your Yeah. Design craft, your brand, your marketing. Yeah. I think it requires intentionality and systems thinking, not just in the design and software context, but even beyond cultural business constraints.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, we have in the front of the New York Stock Exchange today, the sign design is everyone's business. Yep. It's so true.
Speaker 1:The design
Speaker 2:went public.
Speaker 1:It also does seem particularly like reinforcement learning resistant because there's no, like, taste benchmark.
Speaker 4:It's
Speaker 1:It's nondeterministic. Nondeterministic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How did you think about adding to your board heading into the IPO and beyond? Every single investor that that led various rounds from from Andrew to to Danny to Mamoun talked about your thoughtfulness around choosing the right partners at each stage. And I'm and and I know you added Mike Krieger and and Bill, and I I'd love to
Speaker 4:to Louise too. Louise. And, yeah, we're super fortunate to have just the most incredible board. We also have two other own independents, Lynn. She's the former CMO of Salesforce and on some other incredible boards too.
Speaker 4:Kelly Kelly was the former CFO at Cisco. Oh, wow. And they are are just powerhouses. They're amazing. And, yeah, I'm just my mindset whether it be on the VC side, independent side, Although I think as of right now, everyone's now independent.
Speaker 4:Technically.
Speaker 2:As of now. A few hours ago. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Few hours ago with with the gavel. Yeah. Hope. Changed everything. But, yeah, I think that you're looking for folks that you can learn from.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Folks that you love spending time with. Mhmm. Because the perfect board relationship is one where, you know, you're gonna be calling them up with questions and you're gonna really enjoy spending the time and working through with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I don't think they have to be folks. You don't have find board members who are universally great at everything. That's a high ask. Yeah. But when you can find people that spike in certain areas and then you know what to call them for, that is awesome.
Speaker 4:And so I think we have a very great group on the board, also in our exec team, where we just on all these different levels of the company, have folks that really spike in different areas. And then coming together, they, really have they can really help everyone in the group get to the right decision. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Do you think your team pushed nicely to the limit? You can't walk anywhere in the building without seeing, like, either the most iconic merch on the back of somebody down on the trading Floor or, you know, this, like, meticulously designed sign pointing you to, like, a storage closet or something like that. You know,
Speaker 4:I I I had some early previews, but it's nothing like walking around for real. I mean, this was incredible to
Speaker 2:places ever looked.
Speaker 4:I I haven't been here before.
Speaker 2:First time. You know, first time,
Speaker 4:so I can't comment on that.
Speaker 2:But I
Speaker 4:thought today looked exceptional. They're great. Great to work with. It's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk about the evolution of the company culture over just the entire journey. I mean, I have to imagine that, like, just the vibe change from being, you know, pre pre release for four years and then and then growing on this kind of steady trajectory where it was obviously tier one after tier one coming in, but never felt, like, super overhyped and never saw you on, like, the deified podcast circuit, if you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:You're gonna you're gonna be
Speaker 4:doing that right now. Deified
Speaker 1:podcast. Yeah. This is
Speaker 2:Well, you and Evan both both kept, you know, a fair a lower profile than other companies with your financial and
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everything.
Speaker 2:Performance and growth and
Speaker 1:Yeah. So where do you see the company culture going from here on out? Is anything changing, or do you think there's an an evolution or shift?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think you look at the folks that come to Figma.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:We sort of shine this bat signal in the sky of through our product. Mhmm. And the folks that are wanna come work at Figma, a lot of them are people that use Figma.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Of course.
Speaker 4:It's a very creative team. We're very oriented towards craft. Mhmm. Mhmm. We I think as a group, our very first principles oriented.
Speaker 4:We're in the weeds, but we can talk about strategy. People need to be able to go across all those different levels. And I think very growth mindset, very humble, very kind. And I I just think we're builders. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I yeah. I would imagine that in the future that will all be the same. I I don't see why that would change. The things that, you know, I think by a lot right now are just clarity. I think that in order to and this is true for, I think, a lot of organizations.
Speaker 4:Just the more clarity you can create for your team both top down, but also noticing and creating processes for stuff to bubble up from everyone in the organization and then have it meet in the middle and quickly have a great cycle time where you're able to figure out, okay, what is the right decision here and progress? Mhmm. That's what will make it so that you're able to adapt rapidly in an era where everyone has to adapt rapidly right now. Things are changing that fast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:How did the the product demo go the other day with
Speaker 1:Wall Street? Bankers. Are they are they converts converts now?
Speaker 4:You know, I did have one investor come up to me to the roadshow and say that they wanted to be a designer now.
Speaker 1:Well So I
Speaker 2:don't know
Speaker 4:if they actually quit their job and, you know,
Speaker 2:started on the past. Never too late.
Speaker 4:That's what I told them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's never too
Speaker 4:was like, you can be. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. For me We didn't have time to go deep on it, but, like, I was excited to hear that.
Speaker 2:I had never taken a design class. I'd never considered myself a designer. I knew I was creative. And I did have this moment, like, in 2021 when I was like, wait, am I a designer? I, like, use Figma a lot.
Speaker 2:I make a lot of designs. And I this is, like, realization that it was like the reason, you know, a lot of like what what all the people involved here talking about today is like everybody's everybody can be a designer. Everybody can create things, make things. And it was true from the very first moment that I used product. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just balancing that. You talked about having team members that have that range to be able to talk about strategy and then get in the weeds. And Figma, the product, what makes it so incredible is the range where you get invited to a file, you just land in it, you're there, you can see your buddies there in the same file, all all together with your cursors. But then as you understand the product more, there's no I don't think I certainly haven't hit the limit of of what the product's capable and I don't know that maybe anyone has.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's there's this tension always of you gotta make things both approachable and, you know, you also have to cater to the most power user functionality. And for folks that are real power users of the product, how do you make sure that you do both? And I think that that's always a balance we're trying to strike. One thing that helps though is pulling out new areas and use cases into their own products.
Speaker 4:That lets them breathe, but it also makes that Figma design can be focused on product design. So for example, FigJam was the first one we did it for. And we're like
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4:Had noticed for a long time. Okay. People are doing brainstorming, whiteboarding.
Speaker 2:I would make the jankiest whiteboard diagrams and like I would pre design graphics and then I would like make them look nice and then you had to like copy and paste them all in this like weird way and then you guys made FigJam. I was like, okay. Cool. That's I was like making this myself the product Yeah. For years.
Speaker 4:We saw that with many people. And then by taking it and bringing it to his own space, the other thing that we thought about was during pandemic times especially, people were treating Figma Design like a space
Speaker 2:to hang out in. This is what I told Chris.
Speaker 1:And when you go watching the stream
Speaker 2:No. Yeah. Yeah. I told
Speaker 1:six different people. Told this
Speaker 2:I told this to I told this to Chris. I Figma during the pandemic era was like a virtual office where I would open I'd open my computer after my my son would go to bed. It'd be late at night. I'd pop it open. Figma would be open.
Speaker 2:I'd see Brandon in there. I'd see his little cursor. I'd go over and put a
Speaker 1:comment, hey. What's up? How are you
Speaker 2:doing? I would mess with them. I'd change the button colors on them. I'd move stuff around. You know?
Speaker 2:But it was just like it felt like a virtual office. I ultimately didn't adopt any other virtual office tools because I was like, well, I kind of I think at one point, we even designed, like, an office in Figma that everybody jump in.
Speaker 1:You could move your character around a little bit. It's that's
Speaker 4:so funny. I mean, that was part of the insight for how we differentiated FigJam. You know, I told the team, you know, maybe a month before launch, hey, like our differentiator for FigJam is gonna be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And I remember having a board call and I told, you know, the team this and everyone looks at me like, oh, man, you've been sheltering in place way too much, buddy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because that was I mean, there was a bunch of companies that were dedicated to white boarding and I don't even, I haven't heard about them in a while, but Yeah. It wasn't like a category you just waltz into, you know.
Speaker 4:Well, and and to team's credit, I mean, I said this and first there's skepticism and then people are like, okay, let's do it. We did a one day design sprint with like, I don't know, 30 ideas or something like that. I think four or five of them shipped including many of the features that are like the hallmark features of FigJam and stuff that's really gone very broad and like cursor chat for example. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Where we see that pattern replicated in other surfaces now. And that all came out of one day. So it's like Yeah. When you got this amazing creative team, make it so that you're able to unblock them and just to let them go. And if you just point them in direction, it can be incredible what you find.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. We have to let you go. I want to Thank you for having me very much. Talk about everything from quantum computing to Dyson spheres, but that will be for the next one.
Speaker 4:Next one.
Speaker 1:We would love for you to hit the gong with this mallet if you would do us the honor.
Speaker 2:I don't know. We we might wanna use the we might wanna use the regular mallet. I wanna I wanna keep the the precious gongs safe.
Speaker 4:Should we
Speaker 2:Do we have There's a mallet
Speaker 1:right I
Speaker 4:guess we'll use this for the really serious stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Use that one. There's a mallet
Speaker 2:right there. Okay. Oh, there we go. There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:Iconic moment.
Speaker 4:Alright. Happy night, everybody, and thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 5:So great to be here.
Speaker 2:You're a legend. Congratulations. Congrats, Rock. Incredible leader.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We are taping. We are live right now.
Speaker 2:We're taping. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We're still live. Well, it's
Speaker 1:a great time there. But we'll we'll we'll talk to you more after this ring. Thank you
Speaker 2:so You're the man. See you. Congratulations. It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:And we will bring in our next guest.
Speaker 2:Who we got?
Speaker 1:Who do we have?
Speaker 2:I think we have Lynn from Nicey.
Speaker 1:Do we have our next guest available? Perfect. Thank you. We will bring them here. She comes.
Speaker 1:Is the market still open? I don't know. Three Another forty minutes or so. Okay. I'm usually on on West Coast time.
Speaker 1:Hi. You're Hi. Welcome. Nice to meet you. Welcome.
Speaker 1:You are live on the air.
Speaker 2:So so great to be here.
Speaker 1:What a day. What a day. You picked
Speaker 8:the right one. You did.
Speaker 1:I haven't been to the New York my mom knew that I was coming to the New York Stock Exchange and sent me a, picture of me here, when I was 10 years old. And I got a, and I got a booklet, a pamphlet, and then I came in college once for kind of a entrepreneur networking event. I haven't been back since, but I picked the right day. It's been fantastic.
Speaker 8:It's been a great day here.
Speaker 1:Can you introduce yourself in the stream real quick, please?
Speaker 2:Yourself, and then there's so much we wanna talk about.
Speaker 8:I'm Lynn Martin. I'm president of the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 8:It's a great honor
Speaker 1:very much.
Speaker 8:And I'm thrilled to be on this podcast. I listen to
Speaker 1:you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Incredible. This is a big moment for us.
Speaker 1:I mean, we just started a couple months ago. It's been this has definitely been on, like, the vision board of, like, one day, and now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us.
Speaker 2:Totally surreal. First question I have to ask because it's it feels like Figma pushed the limits in terms of making this space, like, feel like the Figma brand. Did they give you any trouble in details of
Speaker 1:Oh, gosh.
Speaker 2:Of design?
Speaker 8:No. I love a good takeover.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 8:You know, this space is really to celebrate Yeah. Capital markets and to celebrate our issuers. And today with the full brand takeover by Figma
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 8:It's been amazing.
Speaker 2:It's been
Speaker 1:amazing. Walk us through what else has gone this year. We've been we've been talking about this dynamic that people were kind of like, is the IPO window open? And then all of a sudden, we'd looked around and it was like, oh, it's wide open. There's been a ton of exciting news.
Speaker 1:But what have been the standout moments this year in your world?
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, the market very much is now open. I don't think anyone is debating that after today.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 8:You know, we've had a lot of great companies come to market. On the tech side, we've had just in the last couple of weeks, we had Accelerant. We had Ambic Micro go yesterday. Yeah. Obviously, Figma today.
Speaker 8:We had Circle.
Speaker 1:Circle. Yep. Couple of
Speaker 8:months ago. That was another great one. Nielsen IQ last week, McGraw Hill
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 8:Hinge Health.
Speaker 1:Hinge Health.
Speaker 8:Mountain. So there's been quite
Speaker 2:fair of deals.
Speaker 8:They've done well. Yes. They've done well. They've helped.
Speaker 1:Broadly important part. IPOs have done very well this
Speaker 8:year. Yeah. And when I'm with institutional investors, the thing that I keep hearing from them, these are, you know, the big long only funds, is we want more issues to come to market. We want to add to our portfolio. When's the market gonna open?
Speaker 8:When's the market gonna open? Yeah. So there's a lot of excitement, euphoria that actually get these companies out and a lot of demand, which I think is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What what are the key goals, the key value props, the key, like, action items that you bring to bear, in your day to day, in your in your role?
Speaker 8:You know, one of my big focuses probably my primary focus is to Let
Speaker 2:me scoot. I mean, scoot on more.
Speaker 8:Alright. Alright.
Speaker 2:We're getting
Speaker 8:We're cozy we're cozy in this Yep. In the studio, is really to ensure that our capital markets remain the envy of the world. For me, it's about price certainty
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:And efficiency of risk management.
Speaker 1:How do you increase those?
Speaker 8:Have to have good technology. Now I'm a technologist Sure. By trade,
Speaker 2:which is few people. How what the path is to becoming the president of the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 8:Of course, in this day and age, you start as a coder. That's how I started.
Speaker 1:No way. That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Where where where where do you write code first?
Speaker 8:I was at IBM.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 8:It's part of their global services consulting practice, and my clients were financial institutions.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Incredible. What what programming language did you write back then?
Speaker 8:You know, you're asking me date myself.
Speaker 1:We we don't need to do that.
Speaker 8:I'm gonna you know, I'll I'll say c.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 8:C was the main one that I
Speaker 1:used. Yeah.
Speaker 8:C plus plus a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, you
Speaker 8:know, I'm not gonna go further back with the other stuff
Speaker 1:I did. Can can you walk us through, like, a day in the life of a CEO going public? I didn't wanna get pull it out of Dylan, but it's, like Well, by the way, and then the just how Cox was trading.
Speaker 2:Calm and collected Dylan wasn't just so focused on product Yeah. Team culture
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Vision.
Speaker 8:But isn't that Dylan?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's Dylan GT. Through. He doesn't
Speaker 2:have to, like, put a he doesn't have to play a character on a day like today. It's just another day.
Speaker 1:Totally. But, yes, walk me through the day in a day in the life of a CEO taking a company public at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 8:Well, you probably have gone through about a ten day period where you've been on the road, and you're probably a little tired.
Speaker 1:Does that mean literally on the when people say roadshow, does that just mean, like, one big conference room where ever where everyone comes to you, or are you literally flying around to different long only funds?
Speaker 8:Mix. Some of the big long onlys, you will go see them in person. Okay. You know, Boston Bay.
Speaker 1:Yes. Like a State Street
Speaker 2:or something.
Speaker 8:I know. One of
Speaker 2:them or something that.
Speaker 8:The Welling Fidelity Fidelity. Probably go see T. Rowe
Speaker 1:and Pearson.
Speaker 8:You know, you're gonna see some of the the big names, the ones that are generally the top holders of everybody. You're gonna probably also see Vanguard and BlackRock and all those folks.
Speaker 1:And some of those are in Manhattan, it might be a stop here. But you're going around, and you really are on the road.
Speaker 7:You're You
Speaker 1:are moving around. On the road. You are
Speaker 4:on the road.
Speaker 1:So ten days of that Yep. Then the big day comes.
Speaker 8:Calendar days Yeah. I'm going. Not not business
Speaker 1:days. Okay.
Speaker 8:So it's more like five or six.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And a half. And then, by the way, you've already done testing the water. So you've already met these people
Speaker 1:online in
Speaker 8:the past. And then the night before, you price.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:Your deal gets priced. Yep. And then the morning of, you
Speaker 1:And how does that how does that happen? Is that just everyone, like, putting in different bids, testing the waters? Is there is there automated system? Or is this is this piece happening more over conference calls and and discussions? Like, walk me through that piece.
Speaker 8:It's probably a better question for the bank
Speaker 6:who's in
Speaker 8:the kit that's doing it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It kinda depends on who's
Speaker 8:doing it. It's probably a bit of everything
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:At the moment, a bit of technology, also some phone calls.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 8:Sure. They set the price where they think the supply that is coming to the market Sure. Price. Yep. And then you go to sleep.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then the next morning, you
Speaker 8:wake up, and, of course, you ring the bell.
Speaker 1:You ring the bell.
Speaker 8:At the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah. And then you have a couple hour period where you're doing media interviews
Speaker 1:Yes. Of course.
Speaker 8:Talking about your company while your stabilization agents trying to figure out where the stocks
Speaker 1:Will actually trade. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Will open. Where it where
Speaker 1:should it open.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 8:There's obviously, you know, a lot of supply on some of these or not not a lot, but a lot of demand.
Speaker 1:A lot of demand on
Speaker 6:on on this
Speaker 1:one in particular.
Speaker 8:Yeah. There's
Speaker 1:always been hearing maybe, you you know, we were hearing, like, rounds of cheers around noon and then one, and then it seemed like this particular stock opened at two kind of around there. Mhmm. And that was all just based on matching the buyers and sellers.
Speaker 2:What what what have you done as president of the exchange to attract these circles and the hinge healths and the and the Figma's. Right? These are the block blockbuster IPOs of the year. There's obviously other players.
Speaker 8:Got it last year.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's obviously other there's other plenty yeah. You know, other companies I won't name that would like to have those opportunities, but what what is what is, you know, what makes NICEE so appealing at this moment?
Speaker 8:Well, I think there's probably a couple of different reasons. Number one, our market model. This fact that there are guys and girls down on the floor who are putting capital to work, taking the other side to stabilize a stock once it is open in the market. So our market model is very much differentiator. We're the only exchange in the world that has that that market model.
Speaker 8:Two are the services that we offer. We partner with the best in class firms to provide the best in class services. And three is the general community
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:That we have of issuers at NYSE.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah. Talk to me about the Bitcoin ETF. That was kind of an interesting one. Was anything different about that?
Speaker 1:How did that kind of play out?
Speaker 8:Yeah. So we were the exchange to bring the first Bitcoin
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:ETF to market in partnership with Grayscale. We actually started working on that in 2016.
Speaker 1:What? Oh. Yeah. I thought you were gonna say it in 2023 because I remember seeing some ads on CNBC and stuff for, like, oh, Beret scale's happening, and then there was the approval, and that took some time.
Speaker 2:Whenever you first got the pitch, was
Speaker 1:it did did
Speaker 2:it did it immediately make sense? Did you think they were crazy at the time?
Speaker 8:I'm a big believer in the fact that ETFs are one of the great innovations
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:Of in financial markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's a vehicle that allows for liquidity and transparency of assets that have less liquidity Sure. And transparency. Transparency. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:So bringing Bitcoin and ETH and some of the other ones that are being talked about into the ETF structure, it really focuses on trans price transparency, liquidity
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And trade certainty.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 8:And the whole investor protection.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 8:So it made a ton of
Speaker 3:sense Yeah.
Speaker 8:To us that someone was thinking, yeah. Well, if you wrap this in an ETF structure
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:You'll actually be able to get institutional investment and people to get exposure to the asset class.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So eight eight years of work, I imagine a lot of that's with the SEC and regulatory. But was there also a piece of talking to the the buy side and the investing group to see if there was demand? Or is that is that a piece of it? Or was it mostly just chopping wood?
Speaker 8:It was chopping a lot of regulatory wood.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That makes sense.
Speaker 8:Lot of that. Grayscale did a great job Yeah. As did the other
Speaker 1:Another overnight success just like Figma.
Speaker 8:Very easy. Overnight success, what, seven or eight years in the making? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Eight years ago in RTL. Exactly. I think Figma was over a decade, but that's how these things happen.
Speaker 2:Exactly. What's been your kind of framework around market volatility this year? How have you talked with clients and issue issuers around just kind of navigating that broadly?
Speaker 8:Mhmm. As a technologist, the big thing that I've been focused on is capacity in the systems to ensure that certainty and efficiency of trading was continuing to persist on those really volatile days. I always like to say you're investing for the long term, though. Like, don't watch the market on any one given day because the markets go up and the markets go down. Yep.
Speaker 8:And we've had such a long period of time where the markets just went up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:And I think people had forgotten that at times markets do go down, and it's it's okay. Yeah. But if you are patient and thoughtful and disciplined about your investing and you invest for the long term, you'll see the rewards of that investment.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Anything else, Jordy?
Speaker 2:What's what what are what are you keeping track of for the rest of the year, the next quarter? What what's
Speaker 8:on your mind? To bring some more IPOs to market.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:We got some big names that we're working with that we're really excited to to come to market. Yeah. And continuing to just watch the market market moves, ensure that our systems are
Speaker 6:Yeah. At
Speaker 1:the How big is the organization right now?
Speaker 8:Well, we're part of a bigger organization. The bigger organization is about 13,000.
Speaker 1:13,000.
Speaker 8:We've got about within our area, we've got about a thousand.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:A thousand folks.
Speaker 2:AI That still feels that still feels pretty lean given given the size of some of the some of the companies that we cover that are maybe a couple years old.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Impressive.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, AI is a big area. We're also
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 8:Watching as well. We've been using AI for more than a decade
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Here. So we're very focused on the application of it for specific use cases, but ensuring that there's
Speaker 2:You're talking about internally, not on the issuer side?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Yeah. Internally. But our area of focus is ensuring data privacy
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 8:Is held. Yeah. That's the utmost importance to us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It seems like we're still in the early innings of actually Oh, yeah. Getting a lot of those products into, like, enterprise ready states.
Speaker 8:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And and when when you're entrusted with the safety and security and liquidity of the the most dominant American capital market, you can't always be on the most risk on frontier in terms of technological adoption.
Speaker 8:Yes. But we've been using AI, for example, to help surveil
Speaker 1:the market.
Speaker 8:You know, you can pay you can point AI Yep. A secure
Speaker 1:Anomaly detection. Data set Sure. Sure.
Speaker 8:And get amazing efficiencies.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Right? And that then feeds back to the human. She's like, okay. Just got a bunch of information based on this dataset Yep. This huge dataset that I just pointed my AI at.
Speaker 8:Yep. It makes the human much more efficient.
Speaker 1:That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
Speaker 2:For this era.
Speaker 1:Thank you for hosting us.
Speaker 2:Given your engineering background. And, yeah, thank you for having us. Hope to be here many more times this year.
Speaker 8:Come back.
Speaker 2:I do. I do. Windows love to. Yes. Windows open enough that we're just here every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just fully relocated. Is there an apartment up there? I'll I'll hang out.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for that.
Speaker 8:Thank you. Thanks for
Speaker 1:having me. Finally meet
Speaker 8:you. It's
Speaker 1:Nice to
Speaker 8:meet you guys.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Cheers. Well, thank you for watching our stream today. Do we have anyone else? Ben, are we ready to wrap?
Speaker 1:I think we're good. Right? That's a wrap That's a
Speaker 2:wrap, folks.
Speaker 1:From the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you
Speaker 2:So much for watching. Many, hopefully. Will see
Speaker 1:you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:One more congratulations to the thousands of Figmates
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That made this a thing. Yeah. It's truly incredible and I can't wait to see where the company goes from here.
Speaker 1:Me too. Thank you for watching. We'll talk to Bye. You