Figma and AI: Dylan Field Advocates a Bold Vision

A Meeting with Dylan Field: The Journey of an Innovator

Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma, spoke at length this week about his career and about AI. Field, who left Brown University in 2012 thanks to a Thiel Fellowship, founded Figma based on a major technological advancement: the use of WebGL to provide advanced graphics capabilities directly in the browser. This innovation allowed Figma to become an essential collaborative tool, often described as the "operating system of design."

Figma's journey has been marked by significant events. In 2022, the company accepted an acquisition offer from Adobe. However, due to regulatory pushback, this merger was abandoned at the end of 2023. Figma then chose to go public in 2025, achieving an impressive valuation of $56.3 billion. Unfortunately, this valuation has since dropped to under $10 billion, partly due to market perceptions that view Figma as a struggling player in the face of AI.

During the interview, Field shared his personal journey, the evolution of Figma, and his vision for creativity and design. He also addressed the issue of AI, which many see as a challenge, but which he perceives as an opportunity. This interview took place during Figma's Config conference, where Field presented how Figma's "Canvas" represents the natural intersection of design and AI.

The Interview

Background

Dylan Field grew up in Penngrove, California, near Petaluma in Sonoma County, and he is careful to point out that it is not in Sonoma itself. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father a respiratory therapist. Neither of them was particularly tech-savvy, but his mother quickly realized that a computer could keep him occupied and answer his endless questions. He got a Compaq Presario at the age of five and spent a lot of time on it.

Field says he has been fascinated by technology for as far back as he can remember. He was eager to learn how to program, but did not have access to a BASIC compiler until later, through a school program. He has also always had a passion for math, even if he did not always have the skills he would have liked.

That fascination was less about how machines work than about what they make possible. For him, it was always "more about thinking about the end product, the design, and the future of technology" than about wanting to master and control the technology itself.

As a child, he thought less about the computer than about concepts like teleportation. On his first visit to San Francisco Airport, he wondered why the whole bathroom system could not be automated. He describes himself as a germophobic child who was fascinated by such ideas.

Asked whether the evolution of bathroom technology over the years leaves him encouraged or discouraged, Field answers: "Encouraged. Toto is wonderful." The brand happens to be in the news for making a certain type of ceramic used for AI applications, which the Figma CEO says he did not know. He points to another design invention he considers very underrated: being able to use your foot to open the door when leaving a bathroom.

Brown is not what one might think of as a tech school. It does sit next to RISD, a design school, which sheds some light on Field's path.

In high school, he says, he was probably a bit overconfident: he thought he could do anything, and the world quickly proved him wrong by showing him there were people much smarter than he was. Because of that self-image, he figured MIT would be the place he wanted to go. He visited on a cloudy day during exams and came away certain: "No, this isn't for me." He then looked at other places.

One person he had talked with a lot, Danah Boyd, whom he met through O'Reilly Media and describes as really brilliant and thoughtful, urged him to think seriously about Brown. During his East Coast college tour, he kept running into Brown alumni, quite at random, who all took an hour to tell him the same thing: "You need to apply to Brown, and if you get in, you have to go." Field describes himself as thorough: he visited ten schools and ended up applying to Olin and Brown on the East Coast. He did not get into Olin, which he thought was his first choice at the time. Getting into Brown surprised him greatly, and thrilled him.

At Brown, he formally declared computer science and math as his concentration. He did not progress as much as he would have liked on the math side and took more computer science courses. He also took advantage of Brown's open curriculum, which he calls incredible and which lets students explore very broadly: he says he had amazing classes in areas that were not technical at all.

The Thiel Fellowship entered the story in the fall semester of his junior year. Field knew of the program from seeing it online and thought it was "a bit of a strange but interesting idea." It was Elizabeth Stark, who he believes now runs Lightning, who introduced him to one of the Thiel Fellows at the time, Dale. The meeting was a strange one: Dale turned up 25 minutes late for a 30-minute meeting at Starbucks. The two talked for only five minutes, but Dale then texted him to say he needed to apply for the Thiel Fellowship, much like what had happened with Brown.

Field ended up applying after talking it over with the man who is now his co-founder, Evan Wallace. Evan was the smartest person he knew: a year above him at Brown, his TA for several classes, "really a genius," and someone fundamentally kind, humble and wonderful. With a few internships behind him, Field decided there was "no one better to start a company with." If Evan was willing to choose this over any of the jobs he could get upon graduation, Field would learn more from it than from anything else. He could always go back to Brown, so it was worth at least exploring, and Evan proved surprisingly willing to explore it with him.

His Thiel Fellowship application was built on an idea about drones, one he now thinks is better realized by BRINC. Evan was not on board for that direction. He was on board for WebGL and graphics, which excited Field too, and that is the direction the two founders took.

The shift from drones to WebGL ties back to the question of what Field was pursuing: the technology, or the end state. He says he has always been excited about a lot of things, creation, creativity, design, even before he knew to call it design. He had in fact only recently learned what the word "design" meant, despite having done a lot of it.

For him, starting a company was a way of asking the question "Why now?" There are many possible answers: a societal, cultural, technological or regulatory change. But Field and Wallace were technologists at their core. So they made a long list of all the technologies that were changing at the time and crossed them off one by one until two finalists remained.

One was drones, at the end of 2011, the other was WebGL. Field thinks they would have totally failed with drones anyway, given how hard the field is. He cites Zipline and BRINC, "incredible companies," where "you really have to bite the glass to make it happen." The two founders wanted to do something where they felt they had a technological advantage and a vision that others did not have.

WebGL and the Foundation of Figma

WebGL is the foundation of Figma: the technology makes it possible to do incredible graphical things in the browser, which until then had been confined to dedicated desktop applications. At the time, it was barely possible.

Field adds a point about the timeline. Just after applying for the Thiel Fellowship with the drone idea, he worked at Flipboard as a design intern, using design programs all day. He and Wallace had, in his words, "this hammer with WebGL looking for a nail," and the idea of going into design did not come right away.