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

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

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In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

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

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

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

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

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

Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode

Dylan’s Favourite Book: Snow Crash

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