HIGHLIGHTS: Dylan Field - CEO of Figma

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody. Welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today, we have the founder and CEO of Figma visiting us, Dylan Field. Now quite incredibly, Dylan founded Figma when he was 19 years old and now fourteen years later. Figma had one of the biggest IPO, IPOs of 2025. So warm welcome. Thank you for having me. So, Dylan, we have to start. What does Figma do? Yes. So Figma is a platform that helps you go from an idea in your head to a production application, in the software space. But also once you ship something, once you ship some software, you want to then market it. And we also help with that too. Mhmm. We help you get your brand out there, and make it so you can create more collateral around it. And ultimately, it's not just some linear process where you have an idea and you get to finish product and you're done. Perhaps in the industrial design world, we were talking about that before Mhmm. We started, that's more of what it is. But in software it's always a loop, and you're always iterating, and you're learning, and you're trying to figure out how do I evolve this thing that I've created with my team, and, we try to make it very collaborative so designers can bring their entire team in to do that. Why is design such an important differentiator? So, I think going back a bit, and speaking about digital product design, the history of design I think is interesting in the digital realm because for a long time there were very very few designers. Almost none of them had a traditional art school background or very few did, and many of them randomly found their way into design. Sometimes from engineering, sometimes they were in a band and made a poster. It could come from any different place, but there's a period of time in, for example 2000, the .com era, where the mantra was build it and they will come. And at that point, if you had a designer, which was rare, the sort of role of design was conceived to be what, sometimes in America we call lipstick on a pig. The, you know, you've got a pig but we're going to put some lipstick on it to make it pretty. And it was really about making it, aesthetically pleasing, but not thinking about the function, the form, how it works. And that has changed dramatically over the past twenty five years. First we got to the 2010 era where you not only have Apple evangelizing design and saying how it works matters. This is why you should buy this iPhone. With Steve Jobs championing design, but also you have the advent of consumer applications like Facebook …