# Garry's Channel: Figma's $20B, 10 year overnight success

**Author:** Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Jp-garry-s-channel-figma-s-20b-10-year-overnight-success
**YouTube ID:** Rb3QHKjOWqQ

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Figma sold to Adobe for $20 BILLION.   
  
Figma replaced Photoshop as the dominant design tool, and that’s what made this company so important Adobe had to buy
it.   
  
In this video we’ll look at some of the moments that were the hardest for Figma co-founder Dylan Field and his team as
they built this incredible business from nothing.

## Transcript

figma just sold Adobe for 20 billion dollars it's 10-year overnight success here's Dylan field 10 years ago when he was 19. if you're an artist you can just sketch something out and draw it and it's beautiful but if I sketch something out I'm not an artist the ideal is a lot of its luster and creative tools like Photoshop or a photo desk are very expensive and they're also very hard to use as well I mean to train yourself to use Photoshop has a very long arduous process Dylan

went on to create figma which replaced Photoshop as the dominant design tool and that's what made this company so important Adobe had to buy it and it didn't come for free Dylan and his team overcame ten thousand landmines a lot of which you will encounter if you start a company today we're looking at just a few of those landmines on that path and how he overcame them let's get started [Music]

[Applause] [Music] in 2011 version 1.0 of webgl came out this was a new way for websites to draw and render Graphics inside a web browser and this is kind of common starting with some sort of Technology Instagram started as experiments around new apis HTML5 meets social locations sharing so that's actually one of the reasons why

Dylan and his co-founder started out with what was a new platform that was yet unexploited you know for context I started figma with my co-founder Evan who is a total genius and much much smarter than I am in August 2012 and for the first I don't know until basically until like June 2013 we were very much in more of an exploration mode and trying to figure out like how do we uh you know what are we going to build and you know what makes sense from a business perspective and I think um we

knew we wanted to do webgl something with webgl which is a way to use the cheap senior computer in the browser uh we knew we wanted to probably do creative tools we knew we carried a lot about accessibility of tools and making it so that you know more people could use those tools we thought kind of agree with a statement that Brett Vector made which is that if you can't use a tool because it's too complex it's a moral wrong and it is today as it was 10 years ago as they say Go West Young person go west go to the frontier explore as Dylan explored if in 2010 it was JavaScript

and in 2012 it was webgl today you might find Frontiers in large language models like gpt3 stable diffusion or others like it you might find it in ZK stocks or L2 blockchains you might find it in computer vision models since computers can now see but technology is not really enough Dylan also knew he had to walk in a particular useful Direction in his case design tools and Hyper usable design tools they saw a need not merely the technology itself out of new

technology yet unexploited not fully understood good will you find teams exploring and building and as physicists learned to understand the atom so too did they discover the periodic table of elements in startups new elements are being discovered all the time usually by Engineers who are seeking the frontier just like this what will your element be now the danger with seeking technology for its own sake is that you

accidentally work on something that you realize just doesn't matter and we've seen this before time and again meaningless products that don't solve real world problems but seem adjacent to hot buzzwords like real-time AI blockchain or social the buzzwords exist for a reason but not every buzzword startup has a reason to exist in this case Dylan and his co-founder found themselves building a meme generator with webgl after like a week of working on this meme generator you know I remember looking at the mirror and being

just going holy like I dropped out a brown for this what what am I doing with my life um you know oh my God and then I walked out of the bathroom after starting the mirror for a while and just feeling really depressed and then uh you know an hour later my co-founder Evan takes his headphones off and he's like doing you know like I just can't do this now meme generators are certainly useful for some people on the internet but this space was just not meaningful for Dylan and Evan knowing yourself matters a lot

other people might find that space to be their life's work but if that's not yours you won't be able to recruit build and do what it takes to create day in and day out and this is a big reason for any person who wants to make something that really stands the test of time the 10-year overnight success does not happen if you and your co-founders can't see yourselves spending a large chunk of your time perhaps the next decade perhaps the next couple decades of your time working towards that mission

I remember back in 2008 2009 when I was working on my startup posturous I had reached a point where I needed to switch into a people manager and I wish I could say at that moment I succeeded at that but in fact I ran away from it and I just coded harder it was the wrong move for posturous it was the wrong move for me and it's one of the reasons why I think posterous didn't make it to the promised land the way figma has figuring out how to become a manager is an impossibly hard situation because a you

might not want to and B you might find that you suck at it initially in fact that's the norm what's crazy is Dylan's Journey as founder almost ended because of this problem even before fidma launched you know leadership is a skill you're probably all aware of um you know you're in clubs you're you know you're you're maybe you're in sports teams and you can experience leadership uh through those areas but I think it's very rare uh before you get into professional settings to really experience management as a skill and

it's actually a very different skill from leadership they're related but they're different and management is a skill that you have to build just like any other skill and there's muscles and sort of different things you have to figure out about it and a year into figma I was figuring out how to be a CEO I was figuring out you know what direction to take the product and I was also figuring around to hire people but most of all I was trying to figure out how to manage people and it wasn't going so well uh I made some hires that probably were you know not the right fit in retrospect culturally

um and I also uh wasn't empowering people enough you know when you hire smart people you got to give them a way to uh to really contribute and to blow you away and to let you to do things that you would never think of and if you micromanage and if you give people all the sort of uh you know here's exactly the recipe for what to do they're not gonna appreciate that if they're the right people to hire and um uh between all that I think like at the same time you know this is a few years in actually but um at the same time my dad was

actually dying of cancer and so there's a lot of emotional stress that I was going through uh which I think you know exasperated things even further and um at some point like there was a conversation with you know this basically our my employees and you know because there's so many things that were happening and I was like let's just all together and talk about it and um it turned out kind of bad it was uh you know people were really unhappy with me and um it was a moment where you know they're like okay we really need you you need to really need to get help uh to to

help make this work and um eventually we did we hired our first outside manager and I actually learned a lot from him but that was a moment where you know I was like oh God like it might all like collapse at this point like people might everyone might leave you know this might this might be the end and uh I think the other part of it was that we hadn't launched yet too Dylan went through it all today he's at the top of the mountain but the most valuable lessons were learned early in the journey at Bay base camp where a lot of us are every highly talented technical founder who

starts who wants to stay in that CEO position for the Long Haul will end up having to learn what Dylan learned how to be a manager and it's not something you can learn without people who have been there get an executive coach hire great managers to work with you to build systems and processes and if you're lucky try to find investors who actually have really helped in that way like gen wolf ad initialized a lot of Founders might get hung up here isn't process and management the opposite of moving fast

but as the Navy Seals say slow is smooth and smooth is fast reducing chaos helping your executive team be as productive as possible all of these things make things smooth and only then can you create something for a billion people don't forget it'll still take 10 years or more just like what Dylan and his team had to go through Dylan and figma showed us one very powerful path towards how these things come together there are

a thousand landmines before every founder and he navigated everyone to this incredible outcome what he saw was not unique to him every founder will pass through these Gates but what was unique is that he did overcome every single one to get here all the world is changing with code with technology the kind that you and your friends can build what will your line of code be [Music]

thanks for watching all the way to the end if you like this please be sure to share this video on Facebook Twitter or wherever you're at and also you can find some of the best clips for my episodes now on the initialized capital Channel Link in the description for that subscribe to that Channel right now and I want to hear from you please leave a comment to tell me more about what you would like to see on this channel I will see you next week [Music]

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