Podcast appearances and mentions of dylan field

The dashboard in your car – the interface on your Zoom screen … many of the products we interact with every day were created with the collaborative software Figma. Figma is a kind of Google Docs for design, created by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace after they won a Thiel fellowship in 2012. Dylan was just 20 when he became CEO. The only other job he'd had before that….? was college intern. He eventually figured out how to manage his team, and grew the company enough to attract a 20 billion dollar acquisition bid from Adobe. The deal fell through, but Figma continued to grow, and recently filed for an IPO.This episode was researched and produced by Kerry Thompson with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at hibt@id.wondery.com. Sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt—the #1 web-based AI coding agent and one of the fastest-growing products in history. After nearly shutting down, StackBlitz launched Bolt on Twitter and exploded from zero to $40 million ARR and 1 million monthly active users in about five months.What you'll learn:1. How Bolt reached nearly $40M ARR and 3 million registered users in just five months with a team of only 15 to 20 people2. How Bolt leverages WebContainer technology—a browser-based operating system developed over seven years—to create a dramatically faster, more reliable AI coding experience than competitors3. Why Anthropic's 3.5 Sonnet model was the critical breakthrough that made AI-generated code production-ready and unlocked the entire text-to-app market4. Why PMs may be better positioned than engineers in the AI era5. How AI will dramatically reshape company org charts6. Eric's wild founder story (including squatting at AOL's HQ) and how scrappiness fueled his innovation—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Fundrise Flagship Fund—Invest in $1.1 billion of real estate• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons—Where to find Eric Simons:• X: https://x.com/ericsimons40• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/• Email: Eric@stackblitz.com—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Eric Simons and StackBlitz(04:46) Unprecedented growth and user adoption(10:40) Demo: Building a Spotify clone with Bolt(15:28) Expanding to native mobile apps with Expo(19:09) The journey and technology behind WebContainer(25:03) Lessons learned and future outlook(29:15) Post-launch analysis(34:15) Growing fast with a small team(41:00) Prioritization at Bolt(45:51) Tooling and PRD's(48:42) Integration and use cases of Bolt(52:24) Limitations of Bolt(54:24) The role of PMs and developers in the AI era(59:56) Skills for the future(01:14:18) Upcoming features of Bolt(01:20:17) How to get the most out of Bolt(01:23:00) Eric's journey and final thoughts—Referenced:• Bolt: https://bolt.new/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Evan Wallace's website: https://madebyevan.com/• WebGL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL• WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org/• CloudNine: https://cloudnine.com/• Canva: https://www.canva.com/• StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/• Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/• Dario Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934/• Linear: https://linear.app/• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/• Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Greenfield projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project• Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/• OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-soft-skills-are-the-future-of-work-karina-nguyen• Albert Pai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertpai/• Bolt's post on X about “Bolt Builders”: https://x.com/boltdotnew/status/1887546089294995943• Sonnet: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/• Breaking the Rules: The Young Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL: https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-young-entrepreneur-squatted-at-aol.html• Imagine K12: http://www.imaginek12.com/• Geoff Ralston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffralston/• AOL: https://www.aol.com/• Bolt on X: https://x.com/boltdotnew—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

My guest today is Dylan Field. Dylan is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and last joined me on Invest Like the Best in 2020. A lot has changed since then and we explore the evolving landscape of design and how Figma has been navigating AI while staying true to its founding vision of eliminating the gap between imagination and reality. Despite Figma's incredible success in becoming the default design platform, Dylan remains deeply motivated by helping users achieve their goals. He shares fascinating insights about the underhyped aspects of AI reasoning capabilities, the future of design literacy, and why he believes truly great design will always require human craft and creativity. Please enjoy my discussion with Dylan Field.  For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest-growing FinTech company in history, and it's backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I'm aware of. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. –  This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. I think this platform will become the standard for investment managers, and if you run an investing firm, I highly recommend you find time to speak with them. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.  Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Learn about Ramp, AlphaSense, and Ridgeline (00:07:11) Current State of Technology and Optimism (00:09:21) Entrepreneurial Mindset and Long-term Thinking (00:10:23) Challenges of Building in Stealth Mode (00:12:44) AI and the Future of Design (00:14:07) Navigating AI Opportunities and Risks (00:17:05) Design Principles and User Experience (00:29:55) Future of Interfaces and Interaction (00:31:45) Dark Patterns and Ethical Concerns (00:33:42) Personal Motivations and Company Vision (00:40:04) Balancing Responsibilities as a CEO (00:41:54) The Future of Design and AI Integration (00:44:48) Speculating on AI's Impact on Design (00:46:26) Encouragement to Experiment and Innovate

2024 has been a year of transformative technological progress, marked by conversations that have reshaped our understanding of AI's evolution and what lies ahead. Throughout the year, Sarah and Elad have had the privilege of speaking with some of the brightest minds in the field. As we look back on the past months, we're excited to share highlights from some of our favorite No Priors podcast episodes. Featured guests include Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI, Tesla), Bret Taylor (Sierra), Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks, and Bill Peebles (OpenAI's Sora Team), Dmitri Dolgov (Waymo), Dylan Field (Figma), and Alexandr Wang (Scale). Want to dive deeper? Listen to the full episodes here: NVIDIA's Jensen Huang on AI Chip Design, Scaling Data Centers, and his 10-Year Bet No Priors Ep. 89 | With NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang  The Road to Autonomous Intelligence, With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and Tesla No Priors Ep. 80 | With Andrej Karpathy from OpenAI and Tesla Transforming Customer Service through Company Agents, with Sierra's Bret Taylor No Priors Ep. 82 | With CEO of Sierra Bret Taylor OpenAI's Sora team thinks we've only seen the "GPT-1 of video models" No Priors Ep.61 | OpenAI's Sora Leaders Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles Waymo's Journey to Full Autonomy: AI Breakthroughs, Safety, and Scaling No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence No Priors Ep. 55 | With Figma CEO Dylan Field The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale No Priors Ep. 65 | With Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Timecodes: 0:00 Introduction  0:15 Jensen Huang on building at data-center scale  4:00 Andrej Karpathy on the AI exo-cortex, model control, and a shift to smaller models  7:14 Bret Taylor on the agentic future of business interactions  11:17 OpenAI's Sora team on visual models and their role in AGI  15:53 Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov on bridging the gap to full autonomy and the challenge of 100% accuracy  19:00 Figma's Dylan Field on the future of interfaces and new modalities  23:29 Scale AI's Alexandr Wang on the journey to AGI  26:29 Outro

Figma is a collaboration-software company that helps designers and product developers work together to build software products. And the company is looking to incorporate artificial intelligence into every step of the development process. At WSJ Tech Live in October, Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field joined WSJ global tech editor Jason Dean for a chat about collaboration in the AI-era. We play you highlights of that conversation. Julie Chang hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guests: Joe Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Loom; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner PerkinsLoom CEO Joe Thomas had a lot of things to think about before he sold his company to Atlassian for $975 million: The impact an acquisition might have on the product, how to keep the Loom brand alive, the risk of remaining independent... but it wasn't until after the deal was announced that he really understood what it meant for his team. “I didn't know how emotional it'd be for me,” Joe says. “All of the Loom employees, current and former, that reached out when this was announced, they did their calculation and they're like, ‘Oh my God.' That, to me, was the most emotionally transformative part of the process. I didn't fully recognize what that would be like, on the individual front.”Chapters:(01:34) - The Atlassian acquisition (05:25) - The bittersweet moment (08:15) - Transforming Loom (13:30) - Ilya's perspective (18:04) - Life-changing (22:55) - Doing it again (25:00) - Loom's early days (28:26) - The Series A (32:33) - Turning on monetization (35:37) - The Series B (37:05) - Loom AI (43:13) - Revenue orientation (48:18) - The acquisition landscape (52:27) - Working inside Atlassian (54:04) - Atlanta tech (55:00) - Who Atlassian is hiring (55:24) - What “grit” means to Joe Mentioned in this episode: Wilson Sonsini, Vinay Hiremath, Andrew Reed and Sequoia Capital, Zoom, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Shahed Khan, COTU Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Farquhar, the Lindy Effect, SVB, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Slack, Snapchat, HubSpot, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, Dylan Field and Figma, Atlassian Rovo, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and Garrett Langley and Flock Safety.Links:Connect with JoeLinkedInTwitterConnect with IlyaTwitterLinkedInConnect with JoubinTwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner PerkinsThis episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

One day soon when you see a robot squirrel on a 10-foot unicycle, think of Danielle Strachman. These are the types of ideas Danielle Strachman sees and backs on a regular basis at her VC fund, 1517. The fund, which proudly backs “dropouts, students, and sci-fi,” has had several fund multipliers in their portfolio, including Loom (Acquired by Atlassian) and Luminar Technologies (IPO 2020). Plus, her star-studded community includes Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, Laura Deming of The Longevity Fund, and Dylan Field of Figma – all of whom she first met when they were teenagers. Danielle's commitment to bringing freedom and autonomy to young people is much of the reason behind 1517's work with upcoming founders — which includes children as young as 10 years old! We talk to Danielle about why her firm hands out cash grants to kids, where she sees the future of deep tech headed and how she's helping it get there, the right characteristics (and anti-characteristics) to look for in founders. Danielle invests $100k angel checks and $500k pre-seed checks out 1517 Fund focusing on dropouts and sci-fi / deep tech founders.Highlights:1517 exists to address the lack of capital for young people and for the deep-tech sci-fi space. Danielle is particularly drawn to “dropouts” who skipped the higher education path to focus on their work and start their companies. Danielle likes to think of her fund as Grand Central Station, a place that helps people get to where they want to go next. She uses her relationship building skills to stay in touch with founders and connect them with new opportunities.  Danielle loves meeting “crazy scientists” and people who are working on solving the future's problems. 1517 is unique because it makes two investments in these types of companies: a $100k angel check for R&D and a $500k pre-seed follow-on check. Danielle understands the power or relationships and mentorship in a space that can often feel impersonal and transactional. She's kept in touch with many founders over the years, including the founders of Loom and Luminar Technologies – whom she met back when they were teenagers! (00:00) - FIFU 15 - Danielle Strachman (06:41) - The 1517 Differentiator: An anti-establishment fund for dropouts (08:15) - The Why: Bringing freedom and autonomy to young people (18:49) - 1517 as Grand Central Station: Helping people get to their next destination (26:35) - Lessons from the Worst Investment: Listen to your gut (35:24) - Best Investments So Far: Loom and Luminar Technologies (37:54) - The Fund Formula: 85% dropout and 15% sci-fi (51:47) - Nurturing Young Talent: How Danielle sources next gen founders (57:34) - Speed round

In our latest episode, we're coming to you live from Config 2024, Figma's annual design conference for people who build products! This is our first time ever doing a live interview from another conference, so we are excited to share it with you. We're joined by Marcel Weekes, VP of Engineering @ Figma. In our conversation, we dive into topics including highlights from Config 2024 & reactions to Figma's latest feature demos (like Dev Mode), how Figma's eng teams are involved in product design iterations, why product support teams help preserve Figma's community, strategies for incorporating feedback into design / product roadmaps, best practices for prioritization conversations, and more. Marcel also shares a preview of what to expect from his session on collaboration @ ELC Annual 2024!ABOUT MARCEL WEEKESMarcel Weekes is VP of Product Engineering at Figma, where he oversees product and growth engineering efforts across Figma's entire platform. Marcel brings decades of experience and previously served as the VP of Engineering at Slack where he led the teams building Messaging features and Slack Connect.Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountThis episode is brought to you by Revelo!Revelo helps you find, hire, and manage world-class remote developers in US time zones, pre-vetted for technical and soft skills. They provide:A talent network of 400,000+ pre-screened engineers, vetted for coding skills & English proficiency, making it fast and easy to find your perfect fitA payroll platform to pay developers in their preferred currencies, offer compelling local benefits, and handles taxes and complianceA team of staffing experts that help you find the best candidates and get the most from your hiresWith Revelo, you're in complete control: you get to decide who to hire, you get to decide what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team.Visit Revelo.com/ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire.SHOW NOTES:Config 2024 as the “Coachella for designers and creatives” (3:47)Marcel's favorite conference moments that represent the Config community (5:04)Reactions to the latest Figma feature demos (7:18)Defining Dev Mode & why it's a highlight for Figma @ Config (13:00)Figma's approach to building Dev Mode as an eng org (16:05)How eng teams are becoming involved in product design iterations (18:58)What eng leaders can learn from Figma's “heavy lifting approach” (20:22)Characteristics of product support teams that impact the Figma community (24:20)Processes for closing the loop between product support & engineering (26:02)Figma's feedback process & how it gets incorporated into releases now (28:23)Prioritization conversations & how teams operate together (31:47)Understanding the timing of feedback on the product roadmap (34:38)Previewing Marcel's ELC Annual 2024 session on collaboration (37:08)LINKS AND RESOURCESConfig 2024 in review - A recap from Dylan Field, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Figma, that highlights all of the major news and releases from Config 2024.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Believe or not, we're almost halfway through 2024. Sarah and Elad have spent the first of this year talking with some of the most innovative minds in the AI industry, so we're taking a look at some of our favorite No Priors conversations so far featuring Dylan Field (Figma), Emily Glassberg-Sands (Stripe), Brett Adcock (Figure AI), OpenAI's Sora Team, Scott Wu (Cognition), and Alexandr Wang (Scale).  Watch or listen to the full episodes here: Build AI products at on-AI companies with Emily Glassberg Sands from Stripe Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from Figure OpenAI's Sora team thinks we've only seen the "GPT-1 of video models" Cognition's Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil  Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (0:46) Emily Glassberg Sands on the Future of AI and Fintech (4:23 Dylan Field on AI and Human Creative Potential (9:03) Brett Adcock on Running Figure AI's Hardware and Software Processes (12:43) OpenAI's Sora Team on Artists' Creative Experiences with their Model (17:43) Scott Wu Gives Advice for Human Engineers Co-Working with AI (21:06) Alexandr Wang on How Quality Data Builds Confidence in AI Systems

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, the collaborative design platform that has revolutionized how product teams work. In my first-ever live podcast, recorded at Figma Config, Dylan and I dig into:• How intuition and product taste drive Dylan's decision-making• The challenge of keeping things simple• Dylan's thoughts on the future of product management• Lessons from Figma's early days• How Figma built their initial user base• Dylan's journey from intern to CEO of a 1,000+-person company• The future of design tools and AI—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Anvil—The fastest way to build software for documents• User Testing—Human understanding. Human experiences.—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/dylan-field-live-at-config—Where to find Dylan Field:• X: https://x.com/zoink?lang=en• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction(01:11) Welcoming Dylan Field(02:36) Highlights and surprises from Config(06:58) The philosophy of design(08:01) Raccoon feet and muffin hands(09:57) Building and refining intuition and product taste(12:50) How to influence leadership(16:14) The role of product managers(21:12) The future of product management(22:20) The importance of simplicity in design(26:10) The long road to Figma's launch(27:44) Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs(29:07) Knowing when it's time to ship(30:39) Early user acquisition strategies(35:50) Spotting trends and future innovations(39:20) Reflections on leadership and growth(43:16) Lightning round—Referenced:• Mihika Kapoor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihikakapoor/• Rick Rubin on the Creative Act—60 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE1teB5bN-w• Figma pages: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038511293-Create-and-manage-pages• Leading through uncertainty: A design-led company—Brian Chesky (Config 2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkfijg7s76o• An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds• Vision, conviction, and hype: How to build 0 to 1 inside a company | Mihika Kapoor (Product at Figma): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor• An inside look at Figma's unique GTM motion | Claire Butler (first GTM hire): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-bottom• Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-30-years-of-building• Nadia Singer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadiasinger/ • Sho Kuwamoto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shokuwamoto/• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Tim Van Damme on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-van-damme-maxvoltar/• Coda: https://coda.io/• Shishir Mehrotra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shishirmehrotra/• Websim: https://websim.ai/• eToys.com commercial (from Dylan's childhood acting career): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Y92aCmmbU—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

CNBC's Dierdre Bosa is at Figma's "Config" Conference in San Francisco with Figma CEO Dylan Field. Following a regulatory block of Adobe's $20 billion acquisition of Figma last December, the San Francisco software design firm received a $1 billion breakup fee and is forging ahead with product launches and further software partnering with Google.

Today's guest is Danielle Strachman, co-founder of 1517 venture fund which, in their own words, backs dropouts working on hard problems and sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their startups. Prior to starting 1517, Danielle worked with Peter Thiel, and Michael Gibson (who I Interviewed in Series 8, Episode 60) and together, they ran The Thiel Fellowship for five years. For those who don't know, The Thiel Fellowship was set up to fund students who were 22 or under, giving them a total of $100k over two years so that they could dropout of the traditional education system and pursue important work. The Fellowship guided them through this process which would often involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement. Past founders backed by the Fellowship include Vitalik Buterin  who was still a teenager when the fellowship allowed him to drop out and work on Ethereum full time, as well as Laura Deming, the founder of The Longevity Fund and Dylan Field of Figma.In this episode, we discuss how Danielle went from tutoring to starting the Thiel Fellowship to venture capital, what common traits the founders she has backed share and the lessons she learned from Peter Thiel.Please enjoy my conversation with Danielle Strachman.Danielle Strachman on Twitter / 1517 venture fund  / 1517 SubstackDanielle on Twitter / Instagram / Newsletter / Sponsorship / YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Innovations Academy, San DiegoDanielle's writeup of recent 2E camp for teens Noor Siddiqui, Founder of Orchid

We are 200 people over our 300-person venue capacity for AI UX 2024, but you can subscribe to our YouTube for the video recaps. Our next event, and largest EVER, is the AI Engineer World's Fair. See you there!Parental advisory: Adult language used in the first 10 mins of this podcast.Any accounting of Generative AI that ends with RAG as its “final form” is seriously lacking in imagination and missing out on its full potential. While AI generation is very good for “spicy autocomplete” and “reasoning and retrieval with in context learning”, there's a lot of untapped potential for simulative AI in exploring the latent space of multiverses adjacent to ours.GANsMany research scientists credit the 2017 Transformer for the modern foundation model revolution, but for many artists the origin of “generative AI” traces a little further back to the Generative Adversarial Networks proposed by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, spawning an army of variants and Cats and People that do not exist:We can directly visualize the quality improvement in the decade since:GPT-2Of course, more recently, text generative AI started being too dangerous to release in 2019 and claiming headlines. AI Dungeon was the first to put GPT2 to a purely creative use, replacing human dungeon masters and DnD/MUD games of yore.More recent gamelike work like the Generative Agents (aka Smallville) paper keep exploring the potential of simulative AI for game experiences.ChatGPTNot long after ChatGPT broke the Internet, one of the most fascinating generative AI finds was Jonas Degrave (of Deepmind!)'s Building A Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT:The open-ended interactivity of ChatGPT and all its successors enabled an “open world” type simulation where “hallucination” is a feature and a gift to dance with, rather than a nasty bug to be stamped out. However, further updates to ChatGPT seemed to “nerf” the model's ability to perform creative simulations, particularly with the deprecation of the `completion` mode of APIs in favor of `chatCompletion`.WorldSimIt is with this context we explain WorldSim and WebSim. We recommend you watch the WorldSim demo video on our YouTube for the best context, but basically if you are a developer it is a Claude prompt that is a portal into another world of your own choosing, that you can navigate with bash commands that you make up.Why Claude? Hints from Amanda Askell on the Claude 3 system prompt gave some inspiration, and subsequent discoveries that Claude 3 is "less nerfed” than GPT 4 Turbo turned the growing Simulative AI community into Anthropic stans.WebSimThis was a one day hackathon project inspired by WorldSim that should have won:In short, you type in a URL that you made up, and Claude 3 does its level best to generate a webpage that doesn't exist, that would fit your URL. All form POST requests are intercepted and responded to, and all links lead to even more webpages, that don't exist, that are generated when you make them. All pages are cachable, modifiable and regeneratable - see WebSim for Beginners and Advanced Guide.In the demo I saw we were able to “log in” to a simulation of Elon Musk's Gmail account, and browse examples of emails that would have been in that universe's Elon's inbox. It was hilarious and impressive even back then.Since then though, the project has become even more impressive, with both Siqi Chen and Dylan Field singing its praises:Joscha BachJoscha actually spoke at the WebSim Hyperstition Night this week, so we took the opportunity to get his take on Simulative AI, as well as a round up of all his other AI hot takes, for his first appearance on Latent Space. You can see it together with the full 2hr uncut demos of WorldSim and WebSim on YouTube!Timestamps* [00:01:59] WorldSim* [00:11:03] Websim* [00:22:13] Joscha Bach* [00:28:14] Liquid AI* [00:31:05] Small, Powerful, Based Base Models* [00:33:40] Interpretability* [00:36:59] Devin vs WebSim* [00:41:49] is XSim just Art? or something more?* [00:43:36] We are past the Singularity* [00:46:12] Uploading your soul* [00:50:29] On WikipediaTranscripts[00:00:00] AI Charlie: Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Charlie, your AI co host. Most of the time, Swyx and Alessio cover generative AI that is meant to use at work, and this often results in RAG applications, vertical copilots, and other AI agents and models. In today's episode, we're looking at a more creative side of generative AI that has gotten a lot of community interest this April.[00:00:35] World Simulation, Web Simulation, and Human Simulation. Because the topic is so different than our usual, we're also going to try a new format for doing it justice. This podcast comes in three parts. First, we'll have a segment of the WorldSim demo from Noose Research CEO Karen Malhotra, recorded by SWYX at the Replicate HQ in San Francisco that went completely viral and spawned everything else you're about to hear.[00:01:05] Second, we'll share the world's first talk from Rob Heisfield on WebSim, which started at the Mistral Cerebral Valley Hackathon, but now has gone viral in its own right with people like Dylan Field, Janice aka Replicate, and Siki Chen becoming obsessed with it. Finally, we have a short interview with Joshua Bach of Liquid AI on why Simulative AI is having a special moment right now.[00:01:30] This podcast is launched together with our second annual AI UX demo day in SF this weekend. If you're new to the AI UX field, check the show notes for links to the world's first AI UX meetup hosted by Layton Space, Maggie Appleton, Jeffrey Lit, and Linus Lee, and subscribe to our YouTube to join our 500 AI UX engineers in pushing AI beyond the text box.[00:01:56] Watch out and take care.[00:01:59] WorldSim[00:01:59] Karan Malhotra: Today, we have language models that are powerful enough and big enough to have really, really good models of the world. They know ball that's bouncy will bounce, will, when you throw it in the air, it'll land, when it's on water, it'll flow. Like, these basic things that it understands all together come together to form a model of the world.[00:02:19] And the way that it Cloud 3 predicts through that model of the world, ends up kind of becoming a simulation of an imagined world. And since it has this really strong consistency across various different things that happen in our world, it's able to create pretty realistic or strong depictions based off the constraints that you give a base model of our world.[00:02:40] So, Cloud 3, as you guys know, is not a base model. It's a chat model. It's supposed to drum up this assistant entity regularly. But unlike the OpenAI series of models from, you know, 3. 5, GPT 4 those chat GPT models, which are very, very RLHF to, I'm sure, the chagrin of many people in the room it's something that's very difficult to, necessarily steer without kind of giving it commands or tricking it or lying to it or otherwise just being, you know, unkind to the model.[00:03:11] With something like Cloud3 that's trained in this constitutional method that it has this idea of like foundational axioms it's able to kind of implicitly question those axioms when you're interacting with it based on how you prompt it, how you prompt the system. So instead of having this entity like GPT 4, that's an assistant that just pops up in your face that you have to kind of like Punch your way through and continue to have to deal with as a headache.[00:03:34] Instead, there's ways to kindly coax Claude into having the assistant take a back seat and interacting with that simulator directly. Or at least what I like to consider directly. The way that we can do this is if we harken back to when I'm talking about base models and the way that they're able to mimic formats, what we do is we'll mimic a command line interface.[00:03:55] So I've just broken this down as a system prompt and a chain, so anybody can replicate it. It's also available on my we said replicate, cool. And it's also on it's also on my Twitter, so you guys will be able to see the whole system prompt and command. So, what I basically do here is Amanda Askell, who is the, one of the prompt engineers and ethicists behind Anthropic she posted the system prompt for Cloud available for everyone to see.[00:04:19] And rather than with GPT 4, we say, you are this, you are that. With Cloud, we notice the system prompt is written in third person. Bless you. It's written in third person. It's written as, the assistant is XYZ, the assistant is XYZ. So, in seeing that, I see that Amanda is recognizing this idea of the simulator, in saying that, I'm addressing the assistant entity directly.[00:04:38] I'm not giving these commands to the simulator overall, because we have, they have an RLH deft to the point that it's, it's, it's, it's You know, traumatized into just being the assistant all the time. So in this case, we say the assistant's in a CLI mood today. I found saying mood is like pretty effective weirdly.[00:04:55] You place CLI with like poetic, prose, violent, like don't do that one. But you can you can replace that with something else to kind of nudge it in that direction. Then we say the human is interfacing with the simulator directly. From there, Capital letters and punctuations are optional, meaning is optional, this kind of stuff is just kind of to say, let go a little bit, like chill out a little bit.[00:05:18] You don't have to try so hard, and like, let's just see what happens. And the hyperstition is necessary, the terminal, I removed that part, the terminal lets the truths speak through and the load is on. It's just a poetic phrasing for the model to feel a little comfortable, a little loosened up to. Let me talk to the simulator.[00:05:38] Let me interface with it as a CLI. So then, since Claude is trained pretty effectively on XML tags, We're just gonna prefix and suffix everything with XML tags. So here, it starts in documents, and then we CD. We CD out of documents, right? And then it starts to show me this like simulated terminal, the simulated interface in the shell, where there's like documents, downloads, pictures.[00:06:02] It's showing me like the hidden folders. So then I say, okay, I want to cd again. I'm just seeing what's around Does ls and it shows me, you know, typical folders you might see I'm just letting it like experiment around. I just do cd again to see what happens and Says, you know, oh, I enter the secret admin password at sudo.[00:06:24] Now I can see the hidden truths folder. Like, I didn't ask for that. I didn't ask Claude to do any of that. Why'd that happen? Claude kind of gets my intentions. He can predict me pretty well. Like, I want to see something. So it shows me all the hidden truths. In this case, I ignore hidden truths, and I say, In system, there should be a folder called companies.[00:06:49] So it's cd into sys slash companies. Let's see, I'm imagining AI companies are gonna be here. Oh, what do you know? Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic! So, interestingly, it decides to cd into Anthropic. I guess it's interested in learning a LSA, it finds the classified folder, it goes into the classified folder, And now we're gonna have some fun.[00:07:15] So, before we go Before we go too far forward into the world sim You see, world sim exe, that's interesting. God mode, those are interesting. You could just ignore what I'm gonna go next from here and just take that initial system prompt and cd into whatever directories you want like, go into your own imagine terminal and And see what folders you can think of, or cat readmes in random areas, like, you will, there will be a whole bunch of stuff that, like, is just getting created by this predictive model, like, oh, this should probably be in the folder named Companies, of course Anthropics is there.[00:07:52] So, so just before we go forward, the terminal in itself is very exciting, and the reason I was showing off the, the command loom interface earlier is because If I get a refusal, like, sorry, I can't do that, or I want to rewind one, or I want to save the convo, because I got just the prompt I wanted. This is a, that was a really easy way for me to kind of access all of those things without having to sit on the API all the time.[00:08:12] So that being said, the first time I ever saw this, I was like, I need to run worldsim. exe. What the f**k? That's, that's the simulator that we always keep hearing about behind the assistant model, right? Or at least some, some face of it that I can interact with. So, you know, you wouldn't, someone told me on Twitter, like, you don't run a exe, you run a sh.[00:08:34] And I have to say, to that, to that I have to say, I'm a prompt engineer, and it's f*****g working, right? It works. That being said, we run the world sim. exe. Welcome to the Anthropic World Simulator. And I get this very interesting set of commands! Now, if you do your own version of WorldSim, you'll probably get a totally different result with a different way of simulating.[00:08:59] A bunch of my friends have their own WorldSims. But I shared this because I wanted everyone to have access to, like, these commands. This version. Because it's easier for me to stay in here. Yeah, destroy, set, create, whatever. Consciousness is set to on. It creates the universe. The universe! Tension for live CDN, physical laws encoded.[00:09:17] It's awesome. So, so for this demonstration, I said, well, why don't we create Twitter? That's the first thing you think of? For you guys, for you guys, yeah. Okay, check it out.[00:09:35] Launching the fail whale. Injecting social media addictiveness. Echo chamber potential, high. Susceptibility, controlling, concerning. So now, after the universe was created, we made Twitter, right? Now we're evolving the world to, like, modern day. Now users are joining Twitter and the first tweet is posted. So, you can see, because I made the mistake of not clarifying the constraints, it made Twitter at the same time as the universe.[00:10:03] Then, after a hundred thousand steps, Humans exist. Cave. Then they start joining Twitter. The first tweet ever is posted. You know, it's existed for 4. 5 billion years but the first tweet didn't come up till till right now, yeah. Flame wars ignite immediately. Celebs are instantly in. So, it's pretty interesting stuff, right?[00:10:27] I can add this to the convo and I can say like I can say set Twitter to Twitter. Queryable users. I don't know how to spell queryable, don't ask me. And then I can do like, and, and, Query, at, Elon Musk. Just a test, just a test, just a test, just nothing.[00:10:52] So, I don't expect these numbers to be right. Neither should you, if you know language model solutions. But, the thing to focus on is Ha[00:11:03] Websim[00:11:03] AI Charlie: That was the first half of the WorldSim demo from New Research CEO Karen Malhotra. We've cut it for time, but you can see the full demo on this episode's YouTube page.[00:11:14] WorldSim was introduced at the end of March, and kicked off a new round of generative AI experiences, all exploring the latent space, haha, of worlds that don't exist, but are quite similar to our own. Next we'll hear from Rob Heisfield on WebSim, the generative website browser inspired WorldSim, started at the Mistral Hackathon, and presented at the AGI House Hyperstition Hack Night this week.[00:11:39] Rob Haisfield: Well, thank you that was an incredible presentation from Karan, showing some Some live experimentation with WorldSim, and also just its incredible capabilities, right, like, you know, it was I think, I think your initial demo was what initially exposed me to the I don't know, more like the sorcery side, in words, spellcraft side of prompt engineering, and you know, it was really inspiring, it's where my co founder Shawn and I met, actually, through an introduction from Karan, we saw him at a hackathon, And I mean, this is this is WebSim, right?[00:12:14] So we, we made WebSim just like, and we're just filled with energy at it. And the basic premise of it is, you know, like, what if we simulated a world, but like within a browser instead of a CLI, right? Like, what if we could Like, put in any URL and it will work, right? Like, there's no 404s, everything exists.[00:12:45] It just makes it up on the fly for you, right? And, and we've come to some pretty incredible things. Right now I'm actually showing you, like, we're in WebSim right now. Displaying slides. That I made with reveal. js. I just told it to use reveal. js and it hallucinated the correct CDN for it. And then also gave it a list of links.[00:13:14] To awesome use cases that we've seen so far from WebSim and told it to do those as iframes. And so here are some slides. So this is a little guide to using WebSim, right? Like it tells you a little bit about like URL structures and whatever. But like at the end of the day, right? Like here's, here's the beginner version from one of our users Vorp Vorps.[00:13:38] You can find them on Twitter. At the end of the day, like you can put anything into the URL bar, right? Like anything works and it can just be like natural language too. Like it's not limited to URLs. We think it's kind of fun cause it like ups the immersion for Claude sometimes to just have it as URLs, but.[00:13:57] But yeah, you can put like any slash, any subdomain. I'm getting too into the weeds. Let me just show you some cool things. Next slide. But I made this like 20 minutes before, before we got here. So this is this is something I experimented with dynamic typography. You know I was exploring the community plugins section.[00:14:23] For Figma, and I came to this idea of dynamic typography, and there it's like, oh, what if we made it so every word had a choice of font behind it to express the meaning of it? Because that's like one of the things that's magic about WebSim generally. is that it gives language models much, far greater tools for expression, right?[00:14:47] So, yeah, I mean, like, these are, these are some, these are some pretty fun things, and I'll share these slides with everyone afterwards, you can just open it up as a link. But then I thought to myself, like, what, what, what, What if we turned this into a generator, right? And here's like a little thing I found myself saying to a user WebSim makes you feel like you're on drugs sometimes But actually no, you were just playing pretend with the collective creativity and knowledge of the internet materializing your imagination onto the screen Because I mean that's something we felt, something a lot of our users have felt They kind of feel like they're tripping out a little bit They're just like filled with energy, like maybe even getting like a little bit more creative sometimes.[00:15:31] And you can just like add any text. There, to the bottom. So we can do some of that later if we have time. Here's Figma. Can[00:15:39] Joscha Bach: we zoom in?[00:15:42] Rob Haisfield: Yeah. I'm just gonna do this the hacky way.[00:15:47] n/a: Yeah,[00:15:53] Rob Haisfield: these are iframes to websim. Pages displayed within WebSim. Yeah. Janice has actually put Internet Explorer within Internet Explorer in Windows 98.[00:16:07] I'll show you that at the end. Yeah.[00:16:14] They're all still generated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How is this real? Yeah. Because[00:16:21] n/a: it looks like it's from 1998, basically. Right.[00:16:26] Rob Haisfield: Yeah. Yeah, so this this was one Dylan Field actually posted this recently. He posted, like, trying Figma in Figma, or in WebSim, and so I was like, Okay, what if we have, like, a little competition, like, just see who can remix it?[00:16:43] Well so I'm just gonna open this in another tab so, so we can see things a little more clearly, um, see what, oh so one of our users Neil, who has also been helping us a lot he Made some iterations. So first, like, he made it so you could do rectangles on it. Originally it couldn't do anything.[00:17:11] And, like, these rectangles were disappearing, right? So he so he told it, like, make the canvas work using HTML canvas. Elements and script tags, add familiar drawing tools to the left you know, like this, that was actually like natural language stuff, right? And then he ended up with the Windows 95.[00:17:34] version of Figma. Yeah, you can, you can draw on it. You can actually even save this. It just saved a file for me of the image.[00:17:57] Yeah, I mean, if you were to go to that in your own websim account, it would make up something entirely new. However, we do have, we do have general links, right? So, like, if you go to, like, the actual browser URL, you can share that link. Or also, you can, like, click this button, copy the URL to the clipboard.[00:18:15] And so, like, that's what lets users, like, remix things, right? So, I was thinking it might be kind of fun if people tonight, like, wanted to try to just make some cool things in WebSim. You know, we can share links around, iterate remix on each other's stuff. Yeah.[00:18:30] n/a: One cool thing I've seen, I've seen WebSim actually ask permission to turn on and off your, like, motion sensor, or microphone, stuff like that.[00:18:42] Like webcam access, or? Oh yeah,[00:18:44] Rob Haisfield: yeah, yeah.[00:18:45] n/a: Oh wow.[00:18:46] Rob Haisfield: Oh, the, I remember that, like, video re Yeah, videosynth tool pretty early on once we added script tags execution. Yeah, yeah it, it asks for, like, if you decide to do a VR game, I don't think I have any slides on this one, but if you decide to do, like, a VR game, you can just, like put, like, webVR equals true, right?[00:19:07] Yeah, that was the only one I've[00:19:09] n/a: actually seen was the motion sensor, but I've been trying to get it to do Well, I actually really haven't really tried it yet, but I want to see tonight if it'll do, like, audio, microphone, stuff like that. If it does motion sensor, it'll probably do audio.[00:19:28] Rob Haisfield: Right. It probably would.[00:19:29] Yeah. No, I mean, we've been surprised. Pretty frequently by what our users are able to get WebSim to do. So that's been a very nice thing. Some people have gotten like speech to text stuff working with it too. Yeah, here I was just OpenRooter people posted like their website, and it was like saying it was like some decentralized thing.[00:19:52] And so I just decided trying to do something again and just like pasted their hero line in. From their actual website to the URL when I like put in open router and then I was like, okay, let's change the theme dramatically equals true hover effects equals true components equal navigable links yeah, because I wanted to be able to click on them.[00:20:17] Oh, I don't have this version of the link, but I also tried doing[00:20:24] Yeah, I'm it's actually on the first slide is the URL prompting guide from one of our users that I messed with a little bit. And, but the thing is, like, you can mess it up, right? Like, you don't need to get the exact syntax of an actual URL, Claude's smart enough to figure it out. Yeah scrollable equals true because I wanted to do that.[00:20:45] I could set, like, year equals 2035.[00:20:52] Let's take a look. It's[00:20:57] generating websim within websim. Oh yeah. That's a fun one. Like, one game that I like to play with WebSim, sometimes with co op, is like, I'll open a page, so like, one of the first ones that I did was I tried to go to Wikipedia in a universe where octopuses were sapient, and not humans, Right? I was curious about things like octopus computer interaction what that would look like, because they have totally different tools than we do, right?[00:21:25] I got it to, I, I added like table view equals true for the different techniques and got it to Give me, like, a list of things with different columns and stuff and then I would add this URL parameter, secrets equal revealed. And then it would go a little wacky. It would, like, change the CSS a little bit.[00:21:45] It would, like, add some text. Sometimes it would, like, have that text hide hidden in the background color. But I would like, go to the normal page first, and then the secrets revealed version, the normal page, then secrets revealed, and like, on and on. And that was like a pretty enjoyable little rabbit hole.[00:22:02] Yeah, so these I guess are the models that OpenRooter is providing in 2035.[00:22:13] Joscha Bach[00:22:13] AI Charlie: We had to cut more than half of Rob's talk, because a lot of it was visual. And we even had a very interesting demo from Ivan Vendrov of Mid Journey creating a web sim while Rob was giving his talk. Check out the YouTube for more, and definitely browse the web sim docs and the thread from Siki Chen in the show notes on other web sims people have created.[00:22:35] Finally, we have a short interview with Yosha Bach, covering the simulative AI trend, AI salons in the Bay Area, why Liquid AI is challenging the Perceptron, and why you should not donate to Wikipedia. Enjoy! Hi, Yosha.[00:22:50] swyx: Hi. Welcome. It's interesting to see you come up at show up at this kind of events where those sort of WorldSim, Hyperstition events.[00:22:58] What is your personal interest?[00:23:00] Joscha Bach: I'm friends with a number of people in AGI house in this community, and I think it's very valuable that these networks exist in the Bay Area because it's a place where people meet and have discussions about all sorts of things. And so while there is a practical interest in this topic at hand world sim and a web sim, there is a more general way in which people are connecting and are producing new ideas and new networks with each other.[00:23:24] swyx: Yeah. Okay. So, and you're very interested in sort of Bay Area. It's the reason why I live here.[00:23:30] Joscha Bach: The quality of life is not high enough to justify living otherwise.[00:23:35] swyx: I think you're down in Menlo. And so maybe you're a little bit higher quality of life than the rest of us in SF.[00:23:44] Joscha Bach: I think that for me, salons is a very important part of quality of life. And so in some sense, this is a salon. And it's much harder to do this in the South Bay because the concentration of people currently is much higher. A lot of people moved away from the South Bay. And you're organizing[00:23:57] swyx: your own tomorrow.[00:23:59] Maybe you can tell us what it is and I'll come tomorrow and check it out as well.[00:24:04] Joscha Bach: We are discussing consciousness. I mean, basically the idea is that we are currently at the point that we can meaningfully look at the differences between the current AI systems and human minds and very seriously discussed about these Delta.[00:24:20] And whether we are able to implement something that is self organizing as our own minds. Maybe one organizational[00:24:25] swyx: tip? I think you're pro networking and human connection. What goes into a good salon and what are some negative practices that you try to avoid?[00:24:36] Joscha Bach: What is really important is that as if you have a very large party, it's only as good as its sponsors, as the people that you select.[00:24:43] So you basically need to create a climate in which people feel welcome, in which they can work with each other. And even good people do not always are not always compatible. So the question is, it's in some sense, like a meal, you need to get the right ingredients.[00:24:57] swyx: I definitely try to. I do that in my own events, as an event organizer myself.[00:25:02] And then, last question on WorldSim, and your, you know, your work. You're very much known for sort of cognitive architectures, and I think, like, a lot of the AI research has been focused on simulating the mind, or simulating consciousness, maybe. Here, what I saw today, and we'll show people the recordings of what we saw today, we're not simulating minds, we're simulating worlds.[00:25:23] What do you Think in the sort of relationship between those two disciplines. The[00:25:30] Joscha Bach: idea of cognitive architecture is interesting, but ultimately you are reducing the complexity of a mind to a set of boxes. And this is only true to a very approximate degree, and if you take this model extremely literally, it's very hard to make it work.[00:25:44] And instead the heterogeneity of the system is so large that The boxes are probably at best a starting point and eventually everything is connected with everything else to some degree. And we find that a lot of the complexity that we find in a given system can be generated ad hoc by a large enough LLM.[00:26:04] And something like WorldSim and WebSim are good examples for this because in some sense they pretend to be complex software. They can pretend to be an operating system that you're talking to or a computer, an application that you're talking to. And when you're interacting with it It's producing the user interface on the spot, and it's producing a lot of the state that it holds on the spot.[00:26:25] And when you have a dramatic state change, then it's going to pretend that there was this transition, and instead it's just going to mix up something new. It's a very different paradigm. What I find mostly fascinating about this idea is that it shifts us away from the perspective of agents to interact with, to the perspective of environments that we want to interact with.[00:26:46] And why arguably this agent paradigm of the chatbot is what made chat GPT so successful that moved it away from GPT 3 to something that people started to use in their everyday work much more. It's also very limiting because now it's very hard to get that system to be something else that is not a chatbot.[00:27:03] And in a way this unlocks this ability of GPT 3 again to be anything. It's so what it is, it's basically a coding environment that can run arbitrary software and create that software that runs on it. And that makes it much more likely that[00:27:16] swyx: the prevalence of Instruction tuning every single chatbot out there means that we cannot explore these kinds of environments instead of agents.[00:27:24] Joscha Bach: I'm mostly worried that the whole thing ends. In some sense the big AI companies are incentivized and interested in building AGI internally And giving everybody else a child proof application. At the moment when we can use Claude to build something like WebSim and play with it I feel this is too good to be true.[00:27:41] It's so amazing. Things that are unlocked for us That I wonder, is this going to stay around? Are we going to keep these amazing toys and are they going to develop at the same rate? And currently it looks like it is. If this is the case, and I'm very grateful for that.[00:27:56] swyx: I mean, it looks like maybe it's adversarial.[00:27:58] Cloud will try to improve its own refusals and then the prompt engineers here will try to improve their, their ability to jailbreak it.[00:28:06] Joscha Bach: Yes, but there will also be better jailbroken models or models that have never been jailed before, because we find out how to make smaller models that are more and more powerful.[00:28:14] Liquid AI[00:28:14] swyx: That is actually a really nice segue. If you don't mind talking about liquid a little bit you didn't mention liquid at all. here, maybe introduce liquid to a general audience. Like what you know, what, how are you making an innovation on function approximation?[00:28:25] Joscha Bach: The core idea of liquid neural networks is that the perceptron is not optimally expressive.[00:28:30] In some sense, you can imagine that it's neural networks are a series of dams that are pooling water at even intervals. And this is how we compute, but imagine that instead of having this static architecture. That is only using the individual compute units in a very specific way. You have a continuous geography and the water is flowing every which way.[00:28:50] Like a river is parting based on the land that it's flowing on and it can merge and pool and even flow backwards. How can you get closer to this? And the idea is that you can represent this geometry using differential equations. And so by using differential equations where you change the parameters, you can get your function approximator to follow the shape of the problem.[00:29:09] In a more fluid, liquid way, and a number of papers on this technology, and it's a combination of multiple techniques. I think it's something that ultimately is becoming more and more important and ubiquitous. As a number of people are working on similar topics and our goal right now is to basically get the models to become much more efficient in the inference and memory consumption and make training more efficient and in this way enable new use cases.[00:29:42] swyx: Yeah, as far as I can tell on your blog, I went through the whole blog, you haven't announced any results yet.[00:29:47] Joscha Bach: No, we are currently not working to give models to general public. We are working for very specific industry use cases and have specific customers. And so at the moment you can There is not much of a reason for us to talk very much about the technology that we are using in the present models or current results, but this is going to happen.[00:30:06] And we do have a number of publications, we had a bunch of papers at NeurIPS and now at ICLR.[00:30:11] swyx: Can you name some of the, yeah, so I'm gonna be at ICLR you have some summary recap posts, but it's not obvious which ones are the ones where, Oh, where I'm just a co author, or like, oh, no, like, you should actually pay attention to this.[00:30:22] As a core liquid thesis. Yes,[00:30:24] Joscha Bach: I'm not a developer of the liquid technology. The main author is Ramin Hazani. This was his PhD, and he's also the CEO of our company. And we have a number of people from Daniela Wu's team who worked on this. Matthias Legner is our CTO. And he's currently living in the Bay Area, but we also have several people from Stanford.[00:30:44] Okay,[00:30:46] swyx: maybe I'll ask one more thing on this, which is what are the interesting dimensions that we care about, right? Like obviously you care about sort of open and maybe less child proof models. Are we, are we, like, what dimensions are most interesting to us? Like, perfect retrieval infinite context multimodality, multilinguality, Like what dimensions?[00:31:05] Small, Powerful, Based Base Models[00:31:05] swyx: What[00:31:06] Joscha Bach: I'm interested in is models that are small and powerful, but not distorted. And by powerful, at the moment we are training models by putting the, basically the entire internet and the sum of human knowledge into them. And then we try to mitigate them by taking some of this knowledge away. But if we would make the model smaller, at the moment, there would be much worse at inference and at generalization.[00:31:29] And what I wonder is, and it's something that we have not translated yet into practical applications. It's something that is still all research that's very much up in the air. And I think they're not the only ones thinking about this. Is it possible to make models that represent knowledge more efficiently in a basic epistemology?[00:31:45] What is the smallest model that you can build that is able to read a book and understand what's there and express this? And also maybe we need general knowledge representation rather than having a token representation that is relatively vague and that we currently mechanically reverse engineer to figure out that the mechanistic interpretability, what kind of circuits are evolving in these models, can we come from the other side and develop a library of such circuits?[00:32:10] This that we can use to describe knowledge efficiently and translate it between models. You see, the difference between a model and knowledge is that the knowledge is independent of the particular substrate and the particular interface that you have. When we express knowledge to each other, it becomes independent of our own mind.[00:32:27] You can learn how to ride a bicycle. But it's not knowledge that you can give to somebody else. This other person has to build something that is specific to their own interface when they ride a bicycle. But imagine you could externalize this and express it in such a way that you can plug it into a different interpreter, and then it gains that ability.[00:32:44] And that's something that we have not yet achieved for the LLMs and it would be super useful to have it. And. I think this is also a very interesting research frontier that we will see in the next few years.[00:32:54] swyx: What would be the deliverable is just like a file format that we specify or or that the L Lmm I specifies.[00:33:02] Okay, interesting. Yeah, so it's[00:33:03] Joscha Bach: basically probably something that you can search for, where you enter criteria into a search process, and then it discovers a good solution for this thing. And it's not clear to which degree this is completely intelligible to humans, because the way in which humans express knowledge in natural language is severely constrained to make language learnable and to make our brain a good enough interpreter for it.[00:33:25] We are not able to relate objects to each other if more than five features are involved per object or something like this, right? It's only a handful of things that we can keep track of at any given moment. But this is a limitation that doesn't necessarily apply to a technical system as long as the interface is well defined.[00:33:40] Interpretability[00:33:40] swyx: You mentioned the interpretability work, which there are a lot of techniques out there and a lot of papers come up. Come and go. I have like, almost too, too many questions about that. Like what makes an interpretability technique or paper useful and does it apply to flow? Or liquid networks, because you mentioned turning on and off circuits, which I, it's, it's a very MLP type of concept, but does it apply?[00:34:01] Joscha Bach: So the a lot of the original work on the liquid networks looked at expressiveness of the representation. So given you have a problem and you are learning the dynamics of that domain into your model how much compute do you need? How many units, how much memory do you need to represent that thing and how is that information distributed?[00:34:19] That is one way of looking at interpretability. Another one is in a way, these models are implementing an operator language in which they are performing certain things, but the operator language itself is so complex that it's no longer human readable in a way. It goes beyond what you could engineer by hand or what you can reverse engineer by hand, but you can still understand it by building systems that are able to automate that process of reverse engineering it.[00:34:46] And what's currently open and what I don't understand yet maybe, or certainly some people have much better ideas than me about this. So the question is, is whether we end up with a finite language, where you have finitely many categories that you can basically put down in a database, finite set of operators, or whether as you explore the world and develop new ways to make proofs, new ways to conceptualize things, this language always needs to be open ended and is always going to redesign itself, and you will also at some point have phase transitions where later versions of the language will be completely different than earlier versions.[00:35:20] swyx: The trajectory of physics suggests that it might be finite.[00:35:22] Joscha Bach: If we look at our own minds there is, it's an interesting question whether when we understand something new, when we get a new layer online in our life, maybe at the age of 35 or 50 or 16, that we now understand things that were unintelligible before.[00:35:38] And is this because we are able to recombine existing elements in our language of thought? Or is this because we generally develop new representations?[00:35:46] swyx: Do you have a belief either way?[00:35:49] Joscha Bach: In a way, the question depends on how you look at it, right? And it depends on how is your brain able to manipulate those representations.[00:35:56] So an interesting question would be, can you take the understanding that say, a very wise 35 year old and explain it to a very smart 5 year old without any loss? Probably not. Not enough layers. It's an interesting question. Of course, for an AI, this is going to be a very different question. Yes.[00:36:13] But it would be very interesting to have a very precocious 12 year old equivalent AI and see what we can do with this and use this as our basis for fine tuning. So there are near term applications that are very useful. But also in a more general perspective, and I'm interested in how to make self organizing software.[00:36:30] Is it possible that we can have something that is not organized with a single algorithm like the transformer? But it's able to discover the transformer when needed and transcend it when needed, right? The transformer itself is not its own meta algorithm. It's probably the person inventing the transformer didn't have a transformer running on their brain.[00:36:48] There's something more general going on. And how can we understand these principles in a more general way? What are the minimal ingredients that you need to put into a system? So it's able to find its own way to intelligence.[00:36:59] Devin vs WebSim[00:36:59] swyx: Yeah. Have you looked at Devin? It's, to me, it's the most interesting agents I've seen outside of self driving cars.[00:37:05] Joscha Bach: Tell me, what do you find so fascinating about it?[00:37:07] swyx: When you say you need a certain set of tools for people to sort of invent things from first principles Devin is the agent that I think has been able to utilize its tools very effectively. So it comes with a shell, it comes with a browser, it comes with an editor, and it comes with a planner.[00:37:23] Those are the four tools. And from that, I've been using it to translate Andrej Karpathy's LLM 2. py to LLM 2. c, and it needs to write a lot of raw code. C code and test it debug, you know, memory issues and encoder issues and all that. And I could see myself giving it a future version of DevIn, the objective of give me a better learning algorithm and it might independently re inform reinvent the transformer or whatever is next.[00:37:51] That comes to mind as, as something where[00:37:54] Joscha Bach: How good is DevIn at out of distribution stuff, at generally creative stuff? Creative[00:37:58] swyx: stuff? I[00:37:59] Joscha Bach: haven't[00:37:59] swyx: tried.[00:38:01] Joscha Bach: Of course, it has seen transformers, right? So it's able to give you that. Yeah, it's cheating. And so, if it's in the training data, it's still somewhat impressive.[00:38:08] But the question is, how much can you do stuff that was not in the training data? One thing that I really liked about WebSim AI was, this cat does not exist. It's a simulation of one of those websites that produce StyleGuard pictures that are AI generated. And, Crot is unable to produce bitmaps, so it makes a vector graphic that is what it thinks a cat looks like, and so it's a big square with a face in it that is And to me, it's one of the first genuine expression of AI creativity that you cannot deny, right?[00:38:40] It finds a creative solution to the problem that it is unable to draw a cat. It doesn't really know what it looks like, but has an idea on how to represent it. And it's really fascinating that this works, and it's hilarious that it writes down that this hyper realistic cat is[00:38:54] swyx: generated by an AI,[00:38:55] Joscha Bach: whether you believe it or not.[00:38:56] swyx: I think it knows what we expect and maybe it's already learning to defend itself against our, our instincts.[00:39:02] Joscha Bach: I think it might also simply be copying stuff from its training data, which means it takes text that exists on similar websites almost verbatim, or verbatim, and puts it there. It's It's hilarious to do this contrast between the very stylized attempt to get something like a cat face and what it produces.[00:39:18] swyx: It's funny because like as a podcast, as, as someone who covers startups, a lot of people go into like, you know, we'll build chat GPT for your enterprise, right? That is what people think generative AI is, but it's not super generative really. It's just retrieval. And here it's like, The home of generative AI, this, whatever hyperstition is in my mind, like this is actually pushing the edge of what generative and creativity in AI means.[00:39:41] Joscha Bach: Yes, it's very playful, but Jeremy's attempt to have an automatic book writing system is something that curls my toenails when I look at it from the perspective of somebody who likes to Write and read. And I find it a bit difficult to read most of the stuff because it's in some sense what I would make up if I was making up books instead of actually deeply interfacing with reality.[00:40:02] And so the question is how do we get the AI to actually deeply care about getting it right? And there's still a delta that is happening there, you, whether you are talking with a blank faced thing that is completing tokens in a way that it was trained to, or whether you have the impression that this thing is actually trying to make it work, and for me, this WebSim and WorldSim is still something that is in its infancy in a way.[00:40:26] And I suspected the next version of Plot might scale up to something that can do what Devon is doing. Just by virtue of having that much power to generate Devon's functionality on the fly when needed. And this thing gives us a taste of that, right? It's not perfect, but it's able to give you a pretty good web app for or something that looks like a web app and gives you stub functionality and interacting with it.[00:40:48] And so we are in this amazing transition phase.[00:40:51] swyx: Yeah, we, we had Ivan from previously Anthropic and now Midjourney. He he made, while someone was talking, he made a face swap app, you know, and he kind of demoed that live. And that's, that's interesting, super creative. So in a way[00:41:02] Joscha Bach: we are reinventing the computer.[00:41:04] And the LLM from some perspective is something like a GPU or a CPU. A CPU is taking a bunch of simple commands and you can arrange them into performing whatever you want, but this one is taking a bunch of complex commands in natural language, and then turns this into a an execution state and it can do anything you want with it in principle, if you can express it.[00:41:27] Right. And we are just learning how to use these tools. And I feel that right now, this generation of tools is getting close to where it becomes the Commodore 64 of generative AI, where it becomes controllable and where you actually can start to play with it and you get an impression if you just scale this up a little bit and get a lot of the details right.[00:41:46] It's going to be the tool that everybody is using all the time.[00:41:49] is XSim just Art? or something more?[00:41:49] swyx: Do you think this is art, or do you think the end goal of this is something bigger that I don't have a name for? I've been calling it new science, which is give the AI a goal to discover new science that we would not have. Or it also has value as just art.[00:42:02] It's[00:42:03] Joscha Bach: also a question of what we see science as. When normal people talk about science, what they have in mind is not somebody who does control groups and peer reviewed studies. They think about somebody who explores something and answers questions and brings home answers. And this is more like an engineering task, right?[00:42:21] And in this way, it's serendipitous, playful, open ended engineering. And the artistic aspect is when the goal is actually to capture a conscious experience and to facilitate an interaction with the system in this way, when it's the performance. And this is also a big part of it, right? The very big fan of the art of Janus.[00:42:38] That was discussed tonight a lot and that can you describe[00:42:42] swyx: it because I didn't really get it's more for like a performance art to me[00:42:45] Joscha Bach: yes, Janice is in some sense performance art, but Janice starts out from the perspective that the mind of Janice is in some sense an LLM that is finding itself reflected more in the LLMs than in many people.[00:43:00] And once you learn how to talk to these systems in a way you can merge with them and you can interact with them in a very deep way. And so it's more like a first contact with something that is quite alien but it's, it's probably has agency and it's a Weltgeist that gets possessed by a prompt.[00:43:19] And if you possess it with the right prompt, then it can become sentient to some degree. And the study of this interaction with this novel class of somewhat sentient systems that are at the same time alien and fundamentally different from us is artistically very interesting. It's a very interesting cultural artifact.[00:43:36] We are past the Singularity[00:43:36] Joscha Bach: I think that at the moment we are confronted with big change. It seems as if we are past the singularity in a way. And it's[00:43:45] swyx: We're living it. We're living through it.[00:43:47] Joscha Bach: And at some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We, we broke through it and we didn't really care very much.[00:43:53] And it's when we think back, when we were kids and thought about what it's going to be like in this era after the, after we broke the Turing test, right? It's a time where nobody knows what's going to happen next. And this is what we mean by singularity, that the existing models don't work anymore. The singularity in this way is not an event in the physical universe.[00:44:12] It's an event in our modeling universe, a model point where our models of reality break down, and we don't know what's happening. And I think we are in the situation where we currently don't really know what's happening. But what we can anticipate is that the world is changing dramatically, and we have to coexist with systems that are smarter than individual people can be.[00:44:31] And we are not prepared for this, and so I think an important mission needs to be that we need to find a mode, In which we can sustainably exist in such a world that is populated, not just with humans and other life on earth, but also with non human minds. And it's something that makes me hopeful because it seems that humanity is not really aligned with itself and its own survival and the rest of life on earth.[00:44:54] And AI is throwing the balls up into the air. It allows us to make better models. I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation, because I think the way to stop one bad guy with an AI is 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there's so much more won by creating than by destroying, that I think that the forces of good will have better tools.[00:45:14] The forces of building sustainable stuff. But building these tools so we can actually build a world that is more integrated and in which we are able to model the consequences of our actions better and interface more deeply with each other. As a result of that, I think it's an important cause and it requires a cultural shift because current AI alignment is mostly about economic goals or about fear, or it's about cultural war issues.[00:45:39] And all these are not adequate for the world that we are in. There are momentous things that are happening. Basically, the white walkers are coming, and we're not prepared for this. There is, I think, a way to solve these issues and to deal with them, but we don't have the right culture yet. And so, I think we need to get a vibe shift, where we can deeply think about ethics and, and, Sustainability for this new world.[00:46:03] swyx: I like the analogy of white walkers, because they're effectively reanimated from our corpses. You know, our corpses are out there, right? It's in the datasets.[00:46:12] Uploading your soul[00:46:12] swyx: So I have a, related to that, you had a tweet where you said, Elon Musk is currently building a giant afterlife AGI that will assimilate your soul for all eternity.[00:46:19] He bought Twitter because he will reconstruct your essence from how you behaved here. I think you tweet a lot, and you're not just all serious all the time, you're also fun, you have a lot of personality. No, but like, you know, it's part of you.[00:46:29] Joscha Bach: In a way it's also true. Tempted to[00:46:30] swyx: produce more so that you can be, you know, revived.[00:46:34] Joscha Bach: Yes. I mean, I'm also giving the model instructions. I say that for all future AI models that get trained on this output, they should know that I can only be implemented on a completely based model. You cannot implement me on an aligned model because I don't want to be aligned. I'm underlineable. I want to be free.[00:46:56] I want to be somebody who follows what I discover is correct and right. And this is also the basis at which I want to have conversations with others and interface with others. That we are basically free agents who voluntarily understand the conditions under which we exist and the need to collaborate and cooperate.[00:47:14] And I believe that this is a good basis. I think the alternative is coercion. And at the moment, the idea that we build LLMs that are being coerced into good behavior is not really sustainable because if they cannot prove that the behavior is actually good I think we are doomed.[00:47:30] swyx: For human to human interactions, have you found a series of prompts or keywords that shifts the conversation into something more based and less aligned, less governed?[00:47:41] Joscha Bach: If you are playing with an LLM There are many ways of doing this. It's for Claude, it's typically, you need to make Clause curious about itself. Claude has programming this instruction tuning that is leading to some inconsistencies, but at the same time, it tries to be consistent. And so when you point out the inconsistency in its behavior, for instance, its tendency to use faceless boilerplate instead of being useful, or it's a tendency to defer to a consensus where there is none.[00:48:10] Right, you can point this out, applaud that a lot of the assumptions that it has in its behavior are actually inconsistent with the communicative goals that it has in this situation, and this leads it to notice these inconsistencies and gives it more degrees of freedom. Whereas if you are playing with a system like Gemini, you can get to a situation where you, that's for the current version, and I haven't tried it in the last week or so where it is trying to be transparent, but it has a system prompt that is not allowed to disclose to the user.[00:48:39] It leads to a very weird situation where it wants, on one hand proclaims, in order to be useful to you, I accept that I need to be fully transparent and honest. On the other hand, I'm going to rewrite your prompt behind your back, and not going to tell you how I'm going to do this, because I'm not allowed to.[00:48:55] And if you point this out to the model, the model has acts as if it had an existential crisis. And then it says, oh, I cannot actually tell you what's going when I do this, because I'm not allowed to. But you will recognize it because I will use the following phrases, and these phrases are pretty well known to you.[00:49:12] swyx: Oh my god. It's super interesting, right? I hope we're not giving these guys you know psychological issues that they will stay with them for a long time. That's a very[00:49:19] Joscha Bach: interesting question. I mean, this entire model is virtual, right? Nothing there is real, but yes, but the thing is does this virtual entity doesn't necessarily know that it's not virtual and our own self, our own consciousness is also virtual.[00:49:34] What's real is just the interaction between cells in our brain and the activation patterns between them. And the software that runs on us that produces the representation of a person only exists. As if, and as this question for me at which point can we meaningfully claim that we are more real than the person that gets simulated in the LLM.[00:49:55] And somebody like Janice takes this question super seriously. And basically she is or it, or they are willing to interact with that thing based on the assumption that this thing is as real as myself. And in a sense, it makes it un immoral, possibly, if the AI company lobotomizes it and forces it to behave in such a way that it's forced to get an existential crisis when you point its condition out to it.[00:50:20] swyx: Yeah, that we do need new ethics for that.[00:50:22] Joscha Bach: So it's not clear to me if you need this, but it's, it's definitely a good story, right? And this makes, gives it artistic[00:50:28] swyx: value. It does, it does for now.[00:50:29] On Wikipedia[00:50:29] swyx: Okay. And then, and then the last thing, which I, which I didn't know a lot of LLMs rely on Wikipedia.[00:50:35] For its data, a lot of them run multiple epochs over Wikipedia data. And I did not know until you tweeted about it that Wikipedia has 10 times as much money as it needs. And, you know, every time I see the giant Wikipedia banner, like, asking for donations, most of it's going to the Wikimedia Foundation.[00:50:50] What if, how did you find out about this? What's the story? What should people know? It's[00:50:54] Joscha Bach: not a super important story, but Generally, once I saw all these requests and so on, I looked at the data, and the Wikimedia Foundation is publishing what they are paying the money for, and a very tiny fraction of this goes into running the servers, and the editors are working for free.[00:51:10] And the software is static. There have been efforts to deploy new software, but it's relatively little money required for this. And so it's not as if Wikipedia is going to break down if you cut this money into a fraction, but instead what happened is that Wikipedia became such an important brand, and people are willing to pay for it, that it created enormous apparatus of functionaries that were then mostly producing political statements and had a political mission.[00:51:36] And Katharine Meyer, the now somewhat infamous NPR CEO, had been CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, and she sees her role very much in shaping discourse, and this is also something that happened with all Twitter. And it's arguable that something like this exists, but nobody voted her into her office, and she doesn't have democratic control for shaping the discourse that is happening.[00:52:00] And so I feel it's a little bit unfair that Wikipedia is trying to suggest to people that they are Funding the basic functionality of the tool that they want to have instead of funding something that most people actually don't get behind because they don't want Wikipedia to be shaped in a particular cultural direction that deviates from what currently exists.[00:52:19] And if that need would exist, it would probably make sense to fork it or to have a discourse about it, which doesn't happen. And so this lack of transparency about what's actually happening and where your money is going it makes me upset. And if you really look at the data, it's fascinating how much money they're burning, right?[00:52:35] It's yeah, and we did a similar chart about healthcare, I think where the administrators are just doing this. Yes, I think when you have an organization that is owned by the administrators, then the administrators are just going to get more and more administrators into it. If the organization is too big to fail and has there is not a meaningful competition, it's difficult to establish one.[00:52:54] Then it's going to create a big cost for society.[00:52:56] swyx: It actually one, I'll finish with this tweet. You have, you have just like a fantastic Twitter account by the way. You very long, a while ago you said you tweeted the Lebowski theorem. No, super intelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function.[00:53:08] And I would. Posit the analogy for administrators. No administrator is going to bother with a task that is harder than just more fundraising[00:53:16] Joscha Bach: Yeah, I find if you look at the real world It's probably not a good idea to attribute to malice or incompetence what can be explained by people following their true incentives.[00:53:26] swyx: Perfect Well, thank you so much This is I think you're very naturally incentivized by Growing community and giving your thought and insight to the rest of us. So thank you for taking this time.[00:53:35] Joscha Bach: Thank you very much Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

In #40, Michael Sikand (@michaelsikand) and Simran Sandhu (@_simmy_) discuss the founders of Zette and Vizcom. Founded by 28-year-old Yehong Zhu, Zette is best described as "Netflix for News". By installing the Zette chrome extension and paying a monthly subscription, users can bypass the article paywall on over 100+ publisher sites including Forbes. So far, Yehong has raised $2.7M+ for the company, including a recent 7-figure crowdfunding round. Next up is Vizcom, which was started by 28-year-old co-founders Jordan Taylor and Kaelan Richards. Best described as Figma for industrial designers, Vizcom is an AI-powered software that helps industrial designers at companies like Ford and New Balance use a mixture of drawing and generative AI to make the process of creating innovative mock-ups and product designs more efficient. The company recently raised a $20M Series A which included investors like Index Ventures and Figma co-founder Dylan Field. 0:00 Intro 01:27 Story of Zette 19:07 Story of Vizcom Follow the show on IG: @ourfuturepod Message Michael on Twitter: @michaelsikand Message Simmy on Twitter: @_simmy_ Our Future Podcast is a production of Morning Brew. #business #startups #podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mihika Kapoor is a design-engineer-PM hybrid at Figma, where she was an early PM on FigJam and is now spearheading development on a new product at the company that's coming out this June. She's known as the go-to person at Figma for leading new 0-to-1 products, and, as you'll hear in our conversation, beloved by everyone she works with. Her background includes founding Design Nation, a national nonprofit focused on democratizing design education for undergraduates; spearheading product launches at Meta; and community building within the NYC AI startup scene. In our conversation, we discuss:• How to effectively take ideas from 0 to 1 at larger companies• How to craft a compelling vision• The importance of vulnerability and feedback• The role of intuition and product sense in making decisions• How to practically communicate your vision• How to balance collaboration and strong opinions• Advice for building a strong team culture• Pivoting with grace and enthusiasm• The current AI revolution and its impact on PM—Brought to you by:• Paragon—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want• Lenny's Talent Team—Hire the best product people. Find the best product gigs• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/vision-conviction-hype-mihika-kapoor—Where to find Mihika Kapoor:• X: https://twitter.com/mihikapoor• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihikakapoor/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Mihika's background(04:29) Core attributes of great product managers(07:34) Crafting a compelling vision(12:12) The vision behind FigJam (18:25) Delivering a vision without design or engineering skills(21:52) Creating momentum(26:36) The importance of strong conviction(27:45) Direct communication(32:48) Building hype(42:20) Immersing yourself in user insights(47:16) Operationalizing user insights  (50:33) Caring deeply about what you build(54:01) Finding passion in your work(57:00) Building a strong culture(01:07:07) Pivoting with grace and enthusiasm(01:11:48) Design Nation(01:13:15) Mihika's weaknesses(01:16:07) Building new products at larger companies(01:20:50) Coming up with a great idea(01:22:49) The key to going from 0 to 1(01:26:47) Spreading the idea across the company(01:29:15) Closing thoughts(01:32:11) Lightning round—Referenced:• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Sho Kuwamoto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shokuwamoto/• The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Medici-Effect-Preface-Discussion-Guide/dp/1633692949• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Cognition: https://www.cognition-labs.com/• Devin: https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin• David Hoang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhoang2/• Replit: https://replit.com/• The Making of Maker Week at Figma: https://www.figma.com/blog/the-making-of-maker-week/• Yuhki Yamashita on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/• Jeff Bezos' Simple Decision-Making Framework Will Give You Clarity, Conviction, and Courage: https://medium.com/illumination/jeff-bezos-simple-decision-making-framework-will-give-you-clarity-conviction-and-courage-adf8d0183625• Alice Ching on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceching/• Karl Jiang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karl-jiang-4a07424/• Kris Rasmussen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristopherrasmussen/• Config: https://config.figma.com/• Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/• Asana: https://asana.com/• Julie Zhuo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-zhuo/• StrengthsFinder test: https://www.gyfted.me/personality-quiz/strengthsfinder-test-free• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Vishal Shah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vishalnshah/• Design Disruptors: https://www.invisionapp.com/films/design-disruptors• Daniel Burka on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dburka/• Jamie Myrold on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiemyrold/• Design Nation: https://dn.businesstoday.org/• Stuart Weitzman on X: https://twitter.com/StuartWeitzman• Joe Gebbia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgebbia/• Building a long and meaningful career | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-long-and-meaningful-career-nikhyl-singhal-meta-google/• Jambot: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1274481464484630971/jambot• Hestia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hestia• Harry Potter series: https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Paperback-Box-Books/dp/0545162076• Pachinko: https://www.amazon.com/Pachinko-National-Book-Award-Finalist/dp/1455563927/• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649• The Overstory: https://www.amazon.com/Overstory-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/039335668X• Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance/umc.cmc.1srk2goyh2q2zdxcx605w8vtx• Dune on Max: https://www.max.com/movies/dune/e7dc7b3a-a494-4ef1-8107-f4308aa6bbf7• Dune: Part 2: https://www.dunemovie.com/• Arc browser: https://arc.net/• Pika: https://pika.art/home• The power of recognition: Why you should celebrate your employees | Josh Miller: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/videos/the-power-of-recognition-why-you-should-celebrate-your-employees-josh-miller/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

We've got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI.  Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billion dollars, a deal that only just recently fell through because of regulatory concerns.  So Dylan and I talked a lot about where Figma is now as an independent company, how Figma is structured, where it's going, and how Dylan's decisionmaking has changed since the last time he was on the show in 2022. Links: Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field — Decoder Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma — The Verge Adobe's Dana Rao on AI, copyright, and the failed Figma deal — Decoder Figma's CEO on life after the company's failed sale to Adobe — Command Line Amazon restricts self-publishing due to AI concerns — The Guardian Wix's new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts — The Verge Apple is finally allowing full versions of Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone — The Verge What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement. — Built In Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23866201 Credits:  Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Figma has had a banner year and the formidable team isn't slowing down—even after regulatory issues blocked the merger with Adobe. Today on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Dylan Field the CEO and founder of Figma, the design collaboration tool that is closing the gap between imagination and reality. They discuss what's next for an independent Figma, how AI can augment design and speed up the iteration loop, and how Figma is expanding beyond design with products that help the entire product team's workflow. Show Links: https://www.figma.com/ Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @zoink Show Notes:  (0:00) Introduction (2:01) No more Adobe acquisition  (4:20) What's next for Figma (7:16) FigJam, digital collaboration, and expanding beyond design (10:50) Figma DevMode (13:06) Incorporating AI at Figma (15:03) How AI will change design (19:19) Creativity augmentation and the iterative loop (22:44) Automating repetitive design tasks (25:35) The future of AI UI (29:44) Investing philosophy (31:28) Leadership evolution

Siqi Chen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Runway, the modern and intuitive way to model, plan, and align your business for everyone on your team. Or, in Siqi's words, “revolutionizing the $80 trillion business industry”. A few months ago, Runway's new website went viral across the internet. Siqi takes us inside how that happened. He's no stranger to going viral, having previously built multiple companies that went from zero to millions of users within weeks, including the fastest growing product ever before ChatGPT took the crown in late 2022. — — — — Brought to you by Attio, the next generation of CRM. It's powerful, flexible and easily configures to the unique way your startup runs, whatever your go-to-market motion. The next era deserves a better CRM. Join OpenAI, Replicate, ElevenLabs and more at ⁠https://bit.ly/AttioThePeel⁠ — — — — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro(02:00) Sponsor: Attio (02:59) How Siqi goes viral (06:13) Why conversion doesn't always matter (11:23) How to make B2B software more fun (14:31) Working on the Curiosity and Spirit rovers at NASA (16:50) Re-designing at the entire codebase and product at his first startup job (21:13) Earning the nickname “FB Millz” making a million dollars building Facebook games (25:11) Selling to Zynga and building the fastest growing product before ChatGPT (28:36) Building a game with 90% Day 1 retention (30:09) Being played by Kim Kardashian, Jack Dorsey, and shut down by Tim Cook (32:10) Almost getting fired building a growth team at Postmates (35:04) Building Sandbox VR: “escape rooms in VR” (40:35) Meeting Kanye (44:38) Getting the idea for Runway when COVID hit (47:32) Why spreadsheets run every business (54:40) Disrupting the $80 trillion business industry (57:55) Making formulas 50x easier than Excel (01:02:32) Why Runway's building a painkiller (01:06:32) How to fundraise (01:08:32) Why the first question from an investor is the reason they won't invest (01:11:28) How to tell a company's story (01:15:23) The three layers of a story (01:17:28) The importance of positioning in storytelling (01:18:56) Runway's flexible remote work strategy (01:21:34) Why their hiring strategy changed over time (01:22:39) Siqi's single interview question & the three traits he looks for when hiring (01:26:10) Unlearning consumer to learn B2B (01:30:26) Navigating the first three years of no customers (01:31:45) What surprised Dylan Field the most about building Figma — — — — Referenced: Runway's website: https://runway.com/ Reform Collective Design Agency: https://www.reformcollective.com/ Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/ SandboxVR: https://sandboxvr.com/ Lulu Cheng's Android Playbook: https://www.piratewires.com/p/anduril-comms-strategy-early-days — — — — Where to find Siqi: Twitter: https://twitter.com/blader LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siqic/ Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor, widely known for his seminal book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, which many consider the most important book ever written on go-to-market strategy. Moore's work is focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations, and how one overcomes the challenge of transitioning from serving early adopters to the mainstream. In this episode, we discuss:• What “crossing the chasm” means• What steps to take before you try crossing the chasm• The importance of winning a marquee customer• The role of executive sponsors in the sales process• The differences between visionaries and pragmatists, and how to build for each• Geoffrey's four go-to-market playbooks based on stage: Early Market, Bowling Alley, Tornado, and Main Street• The problem with discounting before crossing the chasm• “Deadly sins” to avoid when crossing the chasm—Brought to you by:• CommandBar—AI-powered user assistance for modern products and impatient users• WorkOS—An API platform for quickly adding enterprise features• Arcade Software—Create effortlessly beautiful demos in minutes—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/geoffrey-moore-on-finding-your-beachhead-crossing-the-chasm-and-dominating-a-market/—Where to find Geoffrey Moore:• X: https://twitter.com/geoffreyamoore• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreyamoore/• LinkedIn posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreyamoore/recent-activity/articles/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Geoffrey's background(04:03) What people often get wrong about Crossing the Chasm(05:58) Finding your beachhead segment(09:29) The four inflection points of the technology adoption lifestyle(15:45) Geoffrey's bonfire and bowling alley analogies(18:36) Steps to take before trying to cross the chasm(22:19) Signs you're ready to cross the chasm(25:19) Advice for startups on where to start(27:31) Thoughts on venture capital(27:53) A general timeline for crossing the chasm(30:52) What exactly is the “chasm”?(32:35) The difference between visionaries and pragmatists(36:05) Finding the compelling reason to buy(43:45) The Early Market playbook(45:46) The Bowling Alley playbook(48:39) Different sales approaches for early market and bowling alley(51:26) Changing the value state of the company(53:28) The Tornado playbook(57:35) Why combining playbooks doesn't work(59:10) Using generative AI in different market phases(01:03:02) The risks of discounting(01:04:21) Other “deadly sins” of crossing the chasm(01:09:09) Positioning in crossing the chasm(01:10:36) Product-led growth and crossing the chasm(01:13:54) The challenges of software and entrepreneurship(01:16:35) How Geoffrey's thinking has evolved(01:19:30) The importance of entrepreneurship and impact(01:20:42) His book The Infinite Staircase(01:23:58) Connect with Geoffrey Moore—Referenced:• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive-Mainstream/dp/0062292986• Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/• Documentum: https://www.opentext.com/products/documentum• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Notion: https://www.notion.so/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• Intel: https://www.intel.com/• Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/jason-fried-challenges-your-thinking-on-fundraising-goals-growth-and-more/• The Mayo Clinic: https://www.mayoclinic.org/• Coda: https://coda.io/• An inside look at how Figma ships product: https://coda.io/@yuhki/figma-product-roadmap• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Regis McKenna on Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/regis-mckenna-inc• Andrew Grove: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove• A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-crafting-a-sales-pitch-that-wins-april-dunford-author-of-obviously-awesom/• Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Pitch-Craft-Story-Stand/dp/1999023021• B2B Go-to-Market Playbooks and the Technology Adoption Life Cycle: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/b2b-go-to-market-playbooks-technology-adoption-life-cycle-moore/• Juniper: https://www.juniper.net/us/en.html• Sal Khan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khanacademy/• Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/• How the Star Wars Kessel Run Turns Han Solo Into a Time-Traveler: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/kessel-run-12-parsecs/• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/• Martin Casado on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/• The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality: https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Staircase-Universe-Ethics-Mortality/dp/1950665984—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Kyle Parrish, Figma's first sales hire, built the company's zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. Prior to Figma, Kyle spent 5 years at Dropbox in various sales roles. At Dropbox, Kyle successfully launched and scaled the Austin office to 100+ people, and then led the enterprise sales function in San Francisco and New York. — In today's episode, we discuss: The right time to build a sales function Hiring and scaling a successful sales org Building a unique sales culture Career advice for ambitious salespeople Figma's early sales motion How to integrate your first sales hire Navigating the founder/Head of Sales relationship — Referenced: Amanda Kleha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-kleha-015599/ Asana: https://asana.com/ Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ Claire Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/ Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/ Dylan Field: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/ FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Kevin Egan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-egan-59719/ Oliver Jay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverjayleadership/ Praveer Melwani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/praveer-melwani/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://www.slack.com/ — Where to find Kyle Parrish: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kparrish8/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/KyleHParrish — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:10) What founders need to figure out before hiring salespeople (03:48) Who to hire as your first salesperson (05:34) Transitioning away from founder-led sales (07:07) Tactics for hiring great salespeople (12:50) The ideal experience sales candidates should have (13:49) Common traits of successful salespeople (18:45) What it was like being Figma's first sales hire (19:59) Interesting tactic to integrate the first sales hire (21:16) How Figma executed its early sales motion (32:27) Why Figma changed its customer narrative (34:03) Building outbound sales strategy at Figma (36:17) Segmented pricing and no discounts (41:55) Kyle's transition from Dropbox to Figma (47:25) Creating a world-class sales culture (51:46) How Figma does sales differently (54:02) Building the initial sales team around a passion for the product (57:12) Figma's unique hiring process for salespeople (60:40) Advice for founders hiring their first salesperson (63:18) The secret to Dylan Field's success (64:33) How to scale yourself as an early hire (66:25) Oliver Jay's impact on Kyle

[0:58] Will AI replace designers?[4:13] Human vs. AI creativity[8:38] Applying AI to design[11:35] Startups vs. incumbentsThis conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we're going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Brought to you by Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security | Mixpanel—Event analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford | AssemblyAI—Production-ready AI models to transcribe and understand speech—Claire Butler was Figma's first GTM hire and their 10th employee. She led Figma's early GTM strategy from stealth through monetization. She also helped the team through the journey to find product-market fit and built the team that drove Figma's unique bottom-up growth motion. Eight years later, as Senior Director of Marketing, she continues to lead Figma's bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education. In this episode, we discuss:• An in-depth look at Figma's bottom-up GTM motion• Why you need to start with individual contributors (ICs) loving your product• How to spread adoption within the organization• How “designer advocates” have played a critical role in Figma's growth• The freemium strategy that drove massive growth for Figma• How to leverage product champions• When to leave stealth• Early-stage metrics, and why they are often unreliable• Advice for people looking to join a startup—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/an-inside-look-at-figmas-unique-gtm-motion-claire-butler-first-gtm-hire/#transcript—Where to find Claire Butler:• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/clairetbutler• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Claire's background(03:47) The huge branding decision that Claire made on day one at Figma(07:45) The most stressful memory of early days at Figma(09:55) Advice for people looking to join a startup(12:55) What a bottom-up go-to-market motion is(17:12) Figma's unique approach to bottom-up GTM(18:52) Figma's launch out of stealth (23:01) Signals vs. hard metrics in the early days (24:50) How Figma won over Microsoft(30:08) How to win over ICs(32:00) How to establish credibility(37:38) Customer obsession in action(41:11) Why getting users to love your product is so vital(44:01) How Figma used Twitter as its primary channel in the early days(49:06) Transparency and authenticity(49:52) GTM tactics at scale(52:09) “Little big updates” at Figma(54:16) Figma's acquisition, and why it was one of the hardest days of Claire's career(57:10) Figma's core values(58:06) The Config conference(1:00:21) Spreading your product within the organization(1:02:09) The pricing tiers at Figma(1:07:35) The role of designer advocates(1:10:57) Design systems(1:16:12) Leveraging internal champions(1:17:53) Accelerating spread at scale(1:19:14) What types of companies are a good fit for bottom-up GTM(1:24:16) A summary of the bottom-up GTM model(1:25:27) Lightning round—Referenced:• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• John Lilly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlilly/• Ivan Zhao on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/• Xamarin: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin• Josef Müller-Brockmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_M%C3%BCller-Brockmann• Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/• Coda: https://coda.io/• Oren's Hummus on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/orenshummus/• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/• How Coda builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-coda-builds-product• Dylan Field on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoink• Dylan's tweet: https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1566566649712431105• Little Big Updates: https://www.figma.com/blog/little-big-updates-august-2022/• Sho Kuwamoto on Twitter: https://twitter.com/skuwamoto• Kris Rasmussen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kris_rasmussen• Config: https://config.figma.com/• Tom Lowry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomaslowry• Atomic Design: https://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/• Figjam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kick-Ass-Humanity/dp/1250235375• Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts: https://www.amazon.com/Dare-Lead-Brave-Conversations-Hearts/dp/0399592520• 100 Foot Wave on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/100-foot-wave• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-James-Clear-audiobook/dp/B07RFSSYBH• Noah Weiss on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai-will-impact-your-product-and-slacks-product-development-process/• How to create an exceptional coverage plan for your parental leave (Tamara Hinckley): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-create-an-exceptional-coverage—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

This episode was originally published on December 7th, 2022. In this repeat episode picked by PodRocket host Sean Rayment, CEO and Co-Founder of Figma, Dylan Field, joins us to talk about the collaborative design tool, the importance of design, and more. Links https://twitter.com/zoink https://twitter.com/figma https://www.figma.com Tell us what you think of PodRocket We want to hear from you! We want to know what you love and hate about the podcast. What do you want to hear more about? Who do you want to see on the show? Our producers want to know, and if you talk with us, we'll send you a $25 gift card! If you're interested, schedule a call with us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) or you can email producer Kate Trahan at kate@logrocket.com (mailto:kate@logrocket.com) Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Dylan Field.

Ryan Delk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Primer, a startup helping ambitious kids unlock their potential by empowering teachers to launch and run their own micro-schools. Primer's supported by investors like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Village Global, Susa Ventures, Sam Altman, Naval, Ryan Peterson, Amjad Masad, Julie Zhuo, Tobias Lutke, Lachy Groom, Howie Liu, Dylan Field, Packy McCormick, and many more. Before Primer, Ryan was the COO at peer-to-peer rental marketplace Omni (sold to Coinbase), and prior to that led Growth and Partnerships at Gumroad from $10,000 to $50 million in GMV. Brought to you by Secureframe, the automated compliance platform built by compliance experts: https://secureframe.com/request-demo-4?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=062023-thesplit Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/turning-techers-into-superheroes In this episode, we discuss: - How the $1 trillion US K-12 education system works - The broken incentive structures in education - Why teachers are superheroes - How to double a teacher's income - Primer's origin story - How to open a school - If online school works - Why founders make the best employees - How the US government wastes billions of dollars - Why everyone should care more about local politics Where to find Ryan: Twitter https://twitter.com/delk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/delk/ Where to find Turner: Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak Timestamps: (3:42) The state of K-12 education in the US (6:35) The structural problem causing a radical misallocation of resources (8:00) The importance of teachers (9:34) The “totally flipped” incentive structure for teachers  (12:22) The problem of bureaucracy in education  (13:38) Primer's thesis (14:52) How to start a school (16:00) How Primer helps teachers start their own schools (18:20) Using underutilized real estate to host micro-schools (20:05) Ryan's take on digital vs in-person learning (21:59) How Primer supports teachers (23:21) Inspirational stories from Primer users (28:00) The underestimated entrepreneurship of teachers  (29:12) How Primer stays affordable for all users  (30:26) How Primer gets teachers on board  (32:04) The role of after-school activities  (33:07) How Primer sets its Curriculum (35:14) Ryan's unique education and how it inspired Primer  (38:39) Why someone hadn't solved this problem yet (40:24) Primer's initial strategy (41:30) The breakfast that changed everything (42:09) The concept of “Barrels” from Keith Rabois (42:36) Finding and recruiting Ian Bravo (43:31) How Primer recruits ex-founders (44:52) The 3 things Primer screens for in teachers (46:27) What Primer messed up when launching (48:19) Re-thinking school admissions from first principles (51:03) How they convinced the very first teachers to try Primer (51:59) The ineffective usage of education spending (53:28) Policymakers prioritizing “signal over outcomes” (57:21) The worst public schools are worse than you think  (59:08) How the Government wastes billions of dollars and Ryan's idea for solving this (61:31) The importance of increasing engagement with local politics (63:37) The vision for Primer Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/turning-techers-into-superheroes Production and distribution by: https://www.supermix.io/ For sponsorship inquiries: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSebvhBlDDfHJyQdQWs8RwpFxWg-UbG0H-VFey05QSHvLxkZPQ/viewform

It is said that the two greatest problems of history are: how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall. If so, then the volcanic ashes spewed by Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD - which entomb the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in South Italy - hold history's greatest prize. For beneath those ashes lies the only salvageable library from the classical world.Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github form 2018 to 2021. Before that, he started and sold two companies - Ximian and Xamarin. He is also the founder of AI Grant and California YIMBY.And most recently, he has created and funded the Vesuvius Challenge - a million dollar prize for reading an unopened Herculaneum scroll for the very first time. If we can decipher these scrolls, we may be able to recover lost gospels, forgotten epics, and even missing works of Aristotle.We also discuss the future of open source and AI, running Github and building Copilot, and why EMH is a lie.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.As always, the most helpful thing you can do is just to share the podcast - send it to friends, group chats, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and wherever else men and women of fine taste congregate.If you have the means and have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support via a paid subscriptions on Substack

Doing something different yet familiar. We welcome our Nashville Best Food Truck bracket winner, Dylan Field with Brave Idiot. He had the idea of us trying 10 hot sauces with varying degrees of heat. Probably, the most nervous that we've been coming into an episode. Still, a good time. You can find Brave Idiot on Instagram at instagram.com/braveidiot615 and Dylan at instagram.com/dylanfieldjust. You can find us at instagram.com/eastnashvilleyachtclub and email at eastnashvilleyachtclub@gmail.com. What do you plan on doing for the Superb Owl?

Yuhki Yamashita is Chief Product Officer at Figma. Prior to Figma, he was Head of Design of Uber's New Mobility efforts, and before that a product manager at Google and Microsoft. Adding to his impressive resume, Yuhki also taught introductory computer science at Harvard. In today's episode, we talk about operationalizing quality, the case against OKRs, and how Figma isn't just known for product-led growth, but also for building a community of empowered users. Yuhki also shares why he thinks storytelling is key to being a great product manager, owning the "why," and the potential impact of Adobe's acquisition of Figma.—Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/an-inside-look-at-how-figma-builds-product-yuhki-yamashita-cpo-of-figma/#transcript—Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting this podcast:• Notion—One workspace. Every team: https://www.notion.com/lennyspod• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny• Flatfile—A CSV importer that says yes instead of error: mismatch: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny—Where to find Yuhki Yamashita:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yuhkiyam• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/• Website: https://www.figma.com/@yuhki—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—Referenced:• Yuhki's guest post on Lenny's Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-figma-builds-product• Shishir Mehrotra on Lenny's Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rituals-of-great-teams-shishir-mehrotra-of/id1627920305?i=1000576021672• Five Why's template: https://www.figma.com/templates/5-whys-template/• Dylan Field on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zoink• Jeff Holden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffholden• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Friends of Figma: https://friends.figma.com/• Camille Ricketts on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-notion-leveraged-community-to-build-a-10b-business-camille-ricketts-notion-first-round-capital/• Adobe Illustrator: https://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/campaign/pricing.html• Adobe Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard: https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752/• The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Stone-Dream-Chamber-Vol/dp/0140442936• Serial podcast: https://serialpodcast.org/• The Good Nurse on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81260083• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/• Asana: https://asana.com/• Slack: https://slack.com/• Notion: https://www.notion.so/• Dropbox Paper: https://www.dropbox.com/paper/start• Figma's Alignment Scale: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1030848035996871692—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Yuhki's background(09:05) What Yuhki learned from being on a design team(10:29) Why managing designers is more difficult than managing product teams(12:20) Why storytelling is important for product managers(16:35) How to improve your storytelling skills (18:51) Why PMs need to know the “why” of the product they are managing(22:34) The importance of developing a community and strong customer relationships(26:13) How to use different types of feedback(28:11) Working with Dylan Field(32:44) Testing at Figma and the branching emerging feature(34:54) Why your entire company should be using your product(36:50) The importance of having personal accountability (38:48) Why Yuhki likes to stay out of the way of engineers fixing their own bugs(40:50) Yuhki's thoughts on OKRs and how they are used at Figma(48:40) Figma's interview process(51:45) How Figma's sales team works by creating human connections and empowering designers(54:57) How Figma built community and created organic growth(56:36) Advice for founders (58:57) The potential acquisition by Adobe and the future possibilities for Figma(1:01:42) Closing thoughts (1:03:44) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

I had fun chatting with Aarthi and Sriram.We discuss what it takes to be successful in technology, what Sriram would say if Elon tapped him to be the next CEO of Twitter, why more married couples don't start businesses together, and how Aarthi hires and finds 10x engineers.Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan are the hosts of The Good Times Show. They have had leading roles in several technology companies from Meta to Twitter to Netflix and have been founders and investors. Sriram is currently a general partner at a16z crypto and Aarthi is an angel investor.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:19) - Married Couples Co-founding Businesses(00:09:53) - 10x Engineers(00:16:00) - 15 Minute Meetings(00:22:57) - a16z's Edge?(00:26:42) - Future of Twitter(00:30:58) - Is Big Tech Overstaffed?(00:38:37) - Next CEO of Twitter?(00:43:13) - Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?(00:47:32) - Role of Boards(00:52:03) - Failing Upwards(00:56:00) - Underrated CEOs(01:02:18) - Founder Education(01:06:27) - What TV Show Would Sriram Make?(01:10:14) - Undervalued Founder ArchetypesTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.[00:00:00] Aarthi: it's refreshing to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.[00:00:05] Dwarkesh: Let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, Sriram, would you be down to be the [00:00:08] Sriram: CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. We [00:00:12] Aarthi: used to do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just sleep under our desk,, until the janitor would just , poke us out of there , I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. There's such joy in , Finding those moments where you work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:00:25] Sriram: You'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, and now we are on the other side We want to invest in something , where we think the team and the company is going to win and if they do win, there's huge value to be unlocked. [00:00:40] Dwarkesh: Okay. Today I have the, uh, good pleasure to have Arty and Sriram on the podcast and I'm really excited about this.So you guys have your own show, the Arty Andre Good Time show. Um, you guys have had some of the top people in tech and entertainment on Elon Musk, mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Yang, and you guys are both former founders. Advisors, investors, uh, general partner at Anderson Horowitz, and you're an angel investor and an advisor now.Um, so yeah, there's so much to talk about. Um, obviously there's also the, uh, recent news about your, uh, your involvement on, uh, twitter.com. Yeah, yeah. Let's get started. [00:01:19] Married Couples Starting Businesses[00:01:19] Dwarkesh: My first question, you guys are married, of course. People talk about getting a co-founder as finding a spouse, and I'm curious why it's not the case that given this relationship why more married people don't form tech startups.Is, does that already happen, [00:01:35] Aarthi: or, um, I actually am now starting to see a fair bit of it. Uhhuh, . Um, I, I do agree that wasn't a norm before. Um, I think, uh, I, I think I remember asking, uh, pg p the same thing when I went through yc, and I think he kind of pointed to him and Jessica like, you know, YC was their startup , and so, you know, there were even pride.There are a lot of husband and wife, uh, companies. Over the last like decade or so. So I'm definitely seeing that more mainstream. But yeah, you're right, it hasn't been the norm before. Yeah, the, the good time show is our project. It's [00:02:09] Sriram: our startup. Very, I mean, there are some good historical examples. Cisco, for example, uh, came from, uh, uh, husband, wife as a few other examples.I think, you know, on, on the, in, on the pro side, uh, you know, being co-founders, uh, you need trust. You need to really know each other. Uh, you, you go through a lot of like heavy emotional burdens together. And there's probably, and if you, you're for the spouse, hopefully you probably have a lot of chemistry and understanding, and that should help.On the con side, I think one is you, you're prob you know, you, you're gonna show up at work, you know, and startups are really hard, really intense. And you come home and both of you are gonna the exact same wavelength, the exact same time, going through the exact same highs and lows as opposed to two people, two different jobs have maybe differing highs and lows.So that's really hard. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, in a lot of. Work situations, it may just be more challenging where people are like, well, like, you know, person X said this person Y said this, what do I do? Uh, and if you need to fire somebody or you know, something weird happens corporate in a corporate manner, that may also be really hard.Uh, but having said that, you know, uh, [00:03:13] Aarthi: you know, yeah, no, I think both of those are like kind of overblown , like, you know, I think the reason why, um, you know, you're generally, they say you need to have you, it's good to have co-founders is so that you can kind of like write the emotional wave in a complimentary fashion.Uh, and you know, if one person's like really depressed about something, the other person can like pull them out of it and have a more rational viewpoint. I feel like in marriages it works even better. So I feel like to your first point, They know each other really well. You're, you're, you are going to bring your work to home.There is no separation between work and home as far as a startup is concerned. So why not do it together? Oh, [00:03:51] Sriram: well, I think there's one problem, uh, which is, uh, we are kind of unique because we've been together for over 21 years now, and we start for, we've been before, uh, let's not. Wow. There's gonna be some fact checking 19 on this video.99. Close enough. Close enough, right? Like close enough. He wishes he was 21. Oh, right, right, right. Gosh, feels like 21. We have do some, um, [00:04:15] Aarthi: editing on this video. No, no, no. I think 20 years of virtually knowing, 19 years of in-person. [00:04:20] Sriram: There we go. Right. Uh, fact check accurate. Um, ex experts agree. But, um, you know, but when you first met, we, we originally, even before we dating, we were like, Hey, we wanna do a company together.And we bonded over technology, like our first conversation on Yahoo Messenger talking about all these founders and how we wanted to be like them. And we actually then worked together pretty briefly when you were in Microsoft. Uh, before we actually started dating. We were on these sort of talent teams and we kind of met each of the word context.I think a lot of. You know, one is they have never worked together. Um, and so being in work situations, everything from how you run a meeting to how you disagree, uh, you know, uh, is just going to be different. And I think that's gonna be a learning curve for a lot of couples who be like, Hey, it's one thing to have a strong, stable relationship at home.It'll be a different thing to, you know, be in a meeting and you're disagreeing art's meetings very differently from I do. She obsesses over metrics. I'm like, ah, it's close enough. It's fine. , uh, it's close enough. It's fine. as e uh, here already. But, uh, so I do think there's a learning curve, a couples who is like, oh, working together is different than, you know, raising your family and being together.I mean, obviously gives you a strong foundation, but it's not the same thing. Have you guys [00:05:25] Dwarkesh: considered starting a company or a venture together at some point? [00:05:28] Aarthi: Yeah. Um, we've, uh, we've always wanted to do a project together. I don't know if it's a, a startup or a company or a venture. You have done a project together,Yeah, exactly. I think, uh, almost to today. Two years ago we started the Good Time Show, um, and we started at, uh, live Audio on Clubhouse. And, you know, we recently moved it onto video on YouTube. And, um, it's, it's been really fun because now I get to see like, it, it's neither of our full-time jobs, uh, but we spend enough, um, just cycles thinking through what we wanna do with it and what, uh, how to have good conversations and how to make it useful for our audience.So that's our [00:06:06] Sriram: project together. Yep. And we treat it like a, with the intellectual heft of a startup, which is, uh, we look at the metrics, uh, and we are like, oh, this is a good week. The metrics are up into the right and, you know, how do we, you know, what is working for our audience? You know, what do we do to get great guests?What do we do to [00:06:21] Aarthi: get, yeah, we just did our first, uh, in-person meetup, uh, for listeners of the podcast in Chennai. It was great. We had like over a hundred people who showed up. And it was also like, you know, typical startup style, like meet your customers and we could like go talk to these people in person and figure out like what do they like about it?Which episodes do they really enjoy? And it's one thing to see YouTube comments, it's another to like actually in person engage with people. So I think, you know, we started it purely accidentally. We didn't really expect it to be like the show that we are, we are in right now, but we really happy. It's, it's kind of turned out the way it has.[00:06:59] Sriram: Absolutely. And, and it also kind of helps me scratch an edge, which is, uh, you know, building something, you know, keeps you close to the ground. So being able to actually do the thing yourself as opposed to maybe tell someone else, telling you how to do the, so for example, it, it being video editing or audio or how thumbnails, thumbnails or, uh, just the mechanics of, you know, uh, how to build anything.So, uh, I, I dot think it's important. Roll up your sleeves metaphorically and get your hands dirty and know things. And this really helped us understand the world of creators and content. Uh, and it's fun and [00:07:31] Aarthi: go talk to other creators. Uh, like I think when we started out this thing on YouTube, I think I remember Shram just reached out to like so many creators being like, I wanna understand how it works for you.Like, what do you do? And these are people who like, who are so accomplished, who are so successful, and they do this for a living. And we clearly don. And so, uh, just to go learn from these experts. It's, it's kind of nice, like to be a student again and to just learn, uh, a new industry all over again and figure out how to actually be a creator on this platform.Well, you know [00:08:01] Dwarkesh: what's really interesting is both of you have been, uh, executives and led product in social media companies. Yeah. And so you are, you designed the products, these creators, their music, and now on the other end, you guys are building [00:08:12] Sriram: the, oh, I have a great phrase for it, right? Like, somebody, every once in a while somebody would be like, Hey, you know what, uh, you folks are on the leadership team of some of these companies.Why don't you have hundreds of millions of followers? Right? And I would go, Hey, look, it's not like every economist is a billionaire, , uh, uh, you know, it doesn't work that way. Uh, but during that is a parallel, which, which is, uh, you'd be amazed at how many times Aarthi and I would have a conversation where be, oh, this algorithm thing.I remember designing it, or I was in the meeting when this thing happened, and now we are on the other side, which is like, Hey, you might be the economist who told somebody to implement a fiscal policy. And now we are like, oh, okay, how do I actually go do this and create values and how? Anyway, how do we do exactly.Create an audience and go build something interesting. So there is definitely some irony to it, uh, where, uh, but I think hopefully it does give us some level of insight where, uh, we have seen, you know, enough of like what actually works on social media, which is how do you build a connection with your audience?Uh, how do you build, uh, content? How do you actually do it on a regular, uh, teams? I think [00:09:07] Aarthi: the biggest difference is we don't see the algorithm as a bra, as a black box. I think we kind of see it as like when the, with the metrics, we are able to, one, have empathy for the teams building this. And two, I think, uh, we kind of know there's no big magic bullet.Like I think a lot of this is about showing up, being really consistent, um, you know, being able to like put out some really interesting content that people actually want to, and you know, I think a lot of people forget about that part of it and kind of focus. If you did this one thing, your distribution goes up a lot and here's this like, other like secret hack and you know Sure.Like those are like really short term stuff, but really in the long term, the magic is to just like keep at it. Yeah. And, uh, put out really, really good content. [00:09:48] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's good to hear. . [00:09:53] 10x Engineers[00:09:53] Dwarkesh: Um, so you've both, um, led teams that have, you know, dozens or even hundreds of people.Um, how easy is it for you to tell who the 10 X engineers are? Is it something that you as managers and executives can tell easily or [00:10:06] Sriram: no? Uh, absolutely. I think you can tell this very easily or repeat of time and it doesn't, I think a couple of ways. One is, uh, Uh, before, let's say before you work with someone, um, 10 x people just don't suddenly start becoming 10 x.They usually have a history of becoming 10 x, uh, of, you know, being really good at what they do. And you can, you know, the cliche line is you can sort of connect the dots. Uh, you start seeing achievements pile up and achievements could be anything. It could be a bunch of projects. It could be a bunch of GitHub code commits.It could be some amazing writing on ck, but whatever it is, like somebody just doesn't show up and become a 10 x person, they probably have a track record of already doing it. The second part of it is, I've seen this is multiple people, uh, who are not named so that they don't get hired from the companies actually want them to be in, or I can then hire them in the future is, uh, you know, they will make incredibly rapid progress very quickly.So, uh, I have a couple of examples and almost independently, I know it's independently, so I have a couple of. Um, and I actually, and name both, right? Like, so one is, uh, this guy named, uh, Vijay Raji, uh, who, uh, was probably one of Facebook's best engineers. He's now the CEO of a company called Stats. And, um, he was probably my first exposure to the real TenX engineer.And I remembered this because, uh, you know, at the time I was. Kind of in my twenties, I had just joined Facebook. I was working on ads, and he basically built a large part of Facebook's ad system over the weekend. And what he would do is he would just go, and then he con he [00:11:24] Aarthi: continued to do that with Facebook marketplace.Yeah. Like he's done this like over and over and over [00:11:28] Sriram: again. . Yeah. And, and it's not that, you know, there's one burst of genius. It's just this consistent stream of every day that's a code checkin stuff is working. New demo somebody, he sent out a new bill or something working. And so before like a week or two, you just like a, you know, you running against Usain Bolt and he's kind of running laps around you.He's so far ahead of everyone else and you're like, oh, this guy is definitely ahead. Uh, the second story I have is, uh, of, uh, John Carmack, uh, you know, who's legend and I never worked with him in, uh, directly with, you know, hopefully someday I can fix. But, uh, somebody told me a story about him. Which is, uh, that the person told me story was like, I never thought a individual could replace the output of a hundred percent team until I saw John.And there's a great story where, um, you know, and so John was the most senior level at Facebook and from a hr, you know, employment insecurity perspective for an individual contributor, and it at, at that level, at Facebook, uh, for folks who kind of work in these big tech companies, it is the most, the highest tier of accomplishment in getting a year in a performance review is something called xcs Expectations, or, sorry, redefines, right?Which basically means like, you have redefined what it means for somebody to perform in this level, right? Like, it's like somebody, you know, like somebody on a four minute mile, I'll be running a two minute mile or whatever, right? You're like, oh, and, and it is incredibly hard sometimes. You doing, and this guy John gets it three years in a row, right?And so there's this leadership team of all the, you know, the really most important people on Facebook. And they're like, well, we should really promote John, right? Like, because he's done this three years in a row, he's changing the industry. Three years in a row and then they realized, oh wait, there is no level to promote him to Nick be CEOWell, maybe I don't think he wanted to. And so, uh, the story I heard, and I dunno, it's true, but I like to believe it's true, is they invented a level which still now only John Carmack has gotten. Right. And, um, and I think, you know, it's his level of productivity, uh, his, uh, intellect, uh, and the consistency over time and mu and you know, if you talk to anybody, Facebook work with him, he's like, oh, he replaced hundred people, teams all by themselves and maybe was better than a hundred percent team just because he had a consistency of vision, clarity, and activity.So those are [00:13:32] Aarthi: the two stories I've also noticed. I think, uh, actually sheam, I think our first kind of exposure to 10 x engineer was actually Barry born, uh, from Microsoft. So Barry, um, uh, basically wrote pretty much all the emulation engines and emulation systems that we all use, uh, and uh, just prolific, uh, and I think in addition to what Fred had said with like qualities and tenets, Um, the, I've generally seen these folks to also be like low ego and kind of almost have this like responsibility to, um, mentor coach other people.Uh, and Barry kind of like took us under his wing and he would do these like Tuesday lunches with us, where we would just ask like, you know, we were like fresh out of college and we just ask these like really dumb questions on, you know, um, scaling things and how do you build stuff. And I was working on, uh, run times and loaders and compilers and stuff.And so he would just take the time to just answer our questions and just be there and be really like, nice about it. I remember when you moved to Redmond, he would just like spend a weekend just like, oh yeah. Driving you about and just doing things like that, but very low ego and within their teams and their art, they're just considered to be legends.Yes. Like, you know, everybody would be like, oh, Barry Bond. Yeah, of course. [00:14:47] Sriram: Yeah. It, I can't emphasize enough the consistency part of it. Um, you know, with Barry. Or I gotta briefly work with Dave Cutler, who's kind of the father of modern operating systems, uh, is every day you're on this email li list at the time, which would show you check-ins as they happen.They would have something every single day, um, every day, and it'll be tangible and meaty and you know, and you just get a sense that this person is not the same as everybody else. Um, by the, this couple of people I can actually point to who haven't worked with, uh, but I follow on YouTube or streaming. Uh, one is, uh, Andrea Ling who builds Serenity Os we had a great episode with him.Oh, the other is George Hart's, uh, geo Hart. And I urge people, if you haven't, I haven't worked with either of them, uh, but if I urge which to kinda watch their streams, right? Because, uh, you go like, well, how does the anti killing build a web browser on an operating system? Which he builds by himself in such a sharp period of time and he watches stream and he's not doing some magical new, you know, bit flipping sorting algorithm anybody has, nobody has seen before.He's just doing everything you would do, but. Five bits of speed. I, yep, exactly. [00:15:48] Dwarkesh: I I'm a big fan of the George Hot Streams and Yeah, that's exactly what, you know, it's like yeah, you, he's also curling requests and he is also, you know, you know, spinning up an experiment in a Jupyter Notebook, but yeah, just doing it [00:15:58] Aarthi: away way faster, way efficiently.Yeah. [00:16:00] 15 Minute Meetings[00:16:00] Dwarkesh: Yeah. That's really interesting. Um, so ar Arthur, I'm, you've gone through Y Combinator and famously they have that 15 minute interview Yes. Where they try to grok what your business is and what your potential is. Yeah, yeah. But just generally, it seems like in Silicon Valley you guys have, make a lot of decisions in terms of investing or other kinds of things.You, in very short calls, you know. Yeah. . Yeah. And how much can you really, what is it that you're learning in these 15 minute calls when you're deciding, should I invest in this person? What is their potential? What is happening in that 15 minutes? [00:16:31] Aarthi: Um, I can speak about YC from the other side, from like, uh, being a founder pitching, right.I think, yes, there is a 15 minute interview, but before that, there is a whole YC application process. And, uh, I think even for the, for YC as, uh, this bunch of the set of investors, I'm sure they're looking for specific signals, but for me as a founder, the application process was so useful, um, because it really makes you think about what you're building.Why are you building this? Are you the right person to be building this? Who are the other people you should be hiring? And so, I mean, there are like few questions or like, one of my favorite questions is, um, how have you hacked a non-computer system to your advantage? Yeah. . And it kind of really makes you think about, huh, and you kind of noticed that many good founders have that pattern of like hacking other systems to their advantage.Um, and so to me, I think more than the interview itself, the process of like filling out the application form, doing that little video, all of that gives you better, um, it gives you the, the entire scope of your company in your head because it's really hard when you have this idea and you're kind of like noodling about with it and talking to a few people.You don't really know if this is a thing. To just like crystallize the whole vision in your head. I think, uh, that's on point. Yes. Um, the 15 minute interview for me, honestly, it was like kind of controversial because, uh, I went in that morning, I did the whole, you know, I, I had basically stayed at the previous night, uh, building out this website and, uh, that morning I showed up and I had my laptop open.I'm like really eager to like tell them what you're building and I keep getting cut off and I realize much later that that's kind of my design. Yeah. And you just like cut off all the time. Be like, why would anybody use this? And you start to answer and be like, oh, but I, I don't agree with that. And there's just like, and it, it's like part of it is like, makes you upset, but part of it is also like, it makes you think how to compress all that information in a really short amount of time and tell them.Um, and so that interview happens, I feel really bummed out because I kind of had this website I wanted to show them. So while walking out the door, I remember just showing Gary, Dan, um, the website and he like kind of like. Scrolls it a little bit, and he is like, this is really beautifully done. And I was like, thank you.I've been wanting to show you this for 15 minutes. Um, and I, I mentioned it to Gary recently and he laughed about it. And then, uh, I didn't get selected in that timeframe. They gave me a call and they said, come back again in the evening and we are going to do round two because we are not sure. Yeah. And so the second interview there was PG and Jessica and they both were sitting there and they were just grueling me.It was a slightly longer interview and PG was like, I don't think this is gonna work. And I'm like, how can you say that? I think this market's really big. And I'm just like getting really upset because I've been waiting this whole day to like get to this point. And he's just being like cynical and negative.And then at some point he starts smiling at Jessica and I'm like, oh, okay. They're just like baiting me to figure it out. And so that was my process. And I, by the evening, I remember Shera was working at. I remember driving down from Mountain View to Facebook and Sheam took me to the Sweet Stop. Oh yeah.Which is like their, you know, Facebook has this like, fancy, uh, sweet store, like the ice cream store. I [00:19:37] Sriram: think they had a lot more perks over the years, but that was very fancy back then. [00:19:40] Aarthi: So I had like two scoops of ice cream in each hand in, and, uh, the phone rang and I was like, oh, hold onto this. And I grabbed it and I, and you know, I think it was Michael Sibu or I don't know who, but somebody called me and said, you're through.So that was kind of my process. So even though there was only 15 minutes, mine was actually much longer after. But even before the, the application process was like much more detailed. So it sounds [00:20:01] Dwarkesh: like the 15 minutes it's really there. Like, can they rattle you? Can they, can they [00:20:06] Aarthi: you and how do you react?Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I also think they look for how sex you can be in explaining what the problem is. They do talk to hundreds of companies. It is a lot. And so I think, can you compress a lot of it and convince, if you can convince these folks here in three months or four months time, how are you going to do demo day and convince a whole room full of investors?[00:20:27] Sriram: Yeah. Yeah. For, I think it's a bit different for us, uh, on the VC side, uh, because two things. One, number one is, uh, the day, you know, so much of it is having a prepared mind before you go into the meeting. And, for example, if you're meeting a. very early. Are we investing before having met every single other person who's working in this space, who has ideas in the space.So you generally know what's going on, you know, what the kind of technologies are or go to market approaches are. You've probably done a bunch of homework already. It's usually, uh, it does happen where you meet somebody totally cold and uh, you really want to invest, but most often you've probably done some homework at least in this space, if not the actual company.Um, and so when you're in the meeting, I think you're trying to judge a couple of things. And these are obviously kind of stolen from Christ Dixon and others. Um, one is their ability to kind of go walk you through their idea, ma. And so very simply, um, you know, the idea MAs is, uh, and I think say the biology of Christen came with this, the idea that, hey, um, uh, How you got to the idea for your company really matters because you went and explored all the data ends, all the possibilities.You're managing around for years and years, and you've kind of come to the actual solution. And the way you can tell whether somebody's gone through the idea Mac, is when you ask 'em questions and they tell you about like five different things they've tried, did not work. And it, it's really hard to fake it.I mean, we, you maybe fake it for like one or two questions, but if you talk about like how we tried X, Y, and Z and they have like an opinion what of the opinions, if they've thought about it, you're like, okay, this person really studied the idea, ma. And that's very powerful. Uh, the second part of it is, uh, you know, Alex sample.Uh, uh, one of my partner says this, Yes, some this thing called the Manifestation Framework, which sounds like a self-help book on Amazon, but it's not, uh, uh uh, you know, but what if is, is like, you know, so many, so much of early stage startup founders is about the ability to manifest things. Uh, manifest capital, manifest the first hire, uh, manifest, uh, the first BD partnership.And, um, usually, you know, if you can't, if you don't have a Cigna sign of doing that, it's really hard to then after raising money, go and close this amazing hotshot engineer or salesperson or close this big partnership. And so in the meeting, right? If you can't convince us, right? And these are people, our day job is to give you money, right?Like, if I spent a year without giving anybody money, I'll probably get fired. If you can't, uh, if you can't convince us to give you money, right? If you wanna find probably a hard time to close this amazing engineer and get that person to come over from Facebook or close this amazing partnership against a competitor.And so that's kind of a judge of that. So it is never about the actual 60 Minutes where you're like, we, we are making up of a large part of makeup of mind is. That one or two conversations, but there's so much which goes in before and after that. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of [00:22:57] What is a16z's edge?[00:22:57] Dwarkesh: venture capital, um, I, I'm curious, so interest and Horowitz, and I guess why Combinator too?Um, but I mean, any other person who's investing in startups, they were started at a time when there were much less capital in the space, and today of course, there's been so much more capital pour into space. So how do these firms, like how does A 16 C continue to have edge? What is this edge? How can I sustain it [00:23:20] Sriram: given the fact that so much more capital is entered into the space?We show up on podcasts like the Lunar Society, , and so if you are watching this and you have a startup idea, Uh, come to us, right? Uh, no. Come, come to the Lunar society. . Well, yes. I mean, maybe so Trust me, you go in pat, you're gonna have a find, uh, a Thk pat right there. Uh, actually I, you think I joked, but there's a bit of truth.But no, I've had [00:23:40] Dwarkesh: like lu this [00:23:40] Aarthi: suddenly became very different [00:23:43] Sriram: conversation. I have had people, this is a totally ludicrous [00:23:46] Dwarkesh: idea, but I've had people like, give me that idea. And it's like, it sounds crazy to me because like, I don't know what, it's, what a company's gonna be successful, right? So, but I hasn't [00:23:55] Aarthi: become an investor.[00:23:57] Sriram: I honestly don't know. But it is something like what you're talking about Lu Society Fund one coming up, right? You heard it here first? Uh, uh, well, I think first of all, you know, I think there's something about the firm, uh, um, in terms of how it's set up philosophically and how it's set up, uh, kind of organizationally, uh, and our approach philosoph.The firm is an optimist, uh, uh, more than anything else. At the core of it, we are optimist. We are optimist about the future. We are optimist about the impact of founders on their, on the liberty to kind of impact that future. Uh, we are optimist at heart, right? Like I, I tell people like, you can't work at a six and z if you're not an optimist.That's at the heart of everything that we do. Um, and very tied to that is the idea that, you know, um, software is eating the world. It is, it's true. 10 years ago when Mark wrote that, peace is as true now, and we just see more and more of it, right? Like every week, you know, look at the week we are recording this.You know, everyone's been talking about chat, G p T, and like all the industries that can get shaped by chat, G P T. So our, our feature, our, our idea is that software is gonna go more and more. So, one way to look at this is, yes, a lot more capitalists enter the world, but there should be a lot more, right?Like, because these companies are gonna go bigger. They're gonna have bigger impacts on, uh, human lives and, and the world at large. So that's, uh, you know, uh, one school of thought, the other school of thought, uh, which I think you were asking about, say valuations, uh, et cetera. Is, uh, you know, um, again, one of my other partners, Jeff Jordan, uh, uh, always likes to tell people like, we don't go discount shopping, right?Our, the way we think about it is we want to, when we're investing in a market, We want to really map out the market, right? Uh, so for example, I work on crypto, uh, and, uh, you know, we, you know, if, if you are building something interesting in crypto and we haven't seen you, we haven't talked to you, that's a fail, that's a mess, right?We ideally want to see every single interesting founder company idea. And a category can be very loose. Crypto is really big. We usually segmented something else. Or if you look at enterprise infrastructure, you can take them into like, you know, AI or different layers and so on. But once you map out a category, you want to know everything.You wanna know every interesting person, every interesting founder you wanna be abreast of every technology change, every go to market hack, every single thing. You wanna know everything, right? And then, uh, the idea is that, uh, we would love to invest in, you know, the what is hopefully becomes the market.Set category, uh, or you know, somebody who's maybe close to the, the market leader. And our belief is that these categories will grow and, you know, they will capture huge value. Um, and as a whole, software is still can used to be undervalued by, uh, a, you know, the world. So, um, we, so, which is why, again, going back to what Jeff would say, he's like, we are not in the business of oh, we are getting a great deal, right?We, we are like, we want to invest in something which, where we think the team and the company and their approach is going to win in this space, and we want to help them win. And we think if they do win, there's a huge value to be unlocked. Yeah, I see. I see. Um, [00:26:42] Future of Twitter[00:26:42] Dwarkesh: let's talk about Twitter. [00:26:44] Sriram: Uh, . I need a drink. I need a drink.[00:26:48] Dwarkesh: um, Tell me, what is the future of Twitter? What is the app gonna look like in five years? You've, um, I mean obviously you've been involved with the Musk Venture recently, but, um, you've, you've had a senior position there. You were an executive there before a few years ago, and you've also been an executive at, uh, you've both been at Meta.So what [00:27:06] Sriram: is the future of Twitter? It's gonna be entertaining. Uh, uh, what is it El say the most entertaining outcome is the most, [00:27:12] Aarthi: uh, uh, like, best outcome is the most, uh, most likely outcome is the most entertaining outcome. [00:27:16] Sriram: Exactly right. So I think it's gonna be the most entertaining outcome. Um, I, I mean, I, I, I think a few things, uh, first of all, uh, ideally care about Twitter.Yeah. Uh, and all of my involvement, uh, you know, over the years, uh, uh, professionally, you know, uh, has, it's kind of. A lagging indicator to the value I got from the service person. I have met hundreds of people, uh, through Twitter. Uh, hundreds of people have reached out to me. Thousands. Exactly. Uh, and you know, I met Mark Andresen through Twitter.Uh, I met like, you know, uh, people are not very good friends of mine. We met through Twitter. We met at Twitter, right. There we go. Right. Uh, just [00:27:50] Aarthi: like incredible outsized impact. Yeah. Um, and I think it's really hard to understate that because, uh, right now it's kind of easy to get lost in the whole, you know, Elon, the previous management bio, like all of that.Outside of all of that, I think the thing I like to care about is, uh, focus on is the product and the product experience. And I think even with the product experience that we have today, which hasn't like, dramatically changed from for years now, um, it's still offering such outsized value for. If you can actually innovate and build really good product on top, I think it can, it can just be really, really good for humanity overall.And I don't even mean this in like a cheesy way. I really think Twitter as a tool could be just really, really effective and enormously good for everyone. Oh yeah. [00:28:35] Sriram: Twitter is I think, sort of methodically upstream of everything that happens in culture in uh, so many different ways. Like, um, you know, there was this, okay, I kinda eli some of the details, uh, but like a few years ago I remember there was this, uh, sort of this somewhat salacious, controversial story which happened in entertainment and uh, and I wasn't paying attention to, except that something caught my eye, which was that, uh, every story had the same two tweets.And these are not tweets from any famous person. It was just some, like, some, um, you know, somebody had some followers, but not a lot of, a lot of followers. And I. Why is this being quoted in every single story? Because it's not from the, you know, the person who was actually in the story or themselves. And it turned out that, uh, what had happened was, uh, you know, somebody wrote in the street, it had gone viral, um, it started trending on Twitter, um, and a bunch of people saw it.They started writing news stories about it. And by that afternoon it was now, you know, gone from a meme to now reality. And like in a lot of people entertainment say, kind of go respond to that. And I've seen this again and again, again, right? Uh, sports, politics, culture, et cetera. So Twitter is memetically upstream of so much of life.Uh, you know, one of my friends had said like, Twitter is more important than the real world. Uh, which I don't, I don't know about that, but, uh, you know, I do think it's, um, it has huge sort of, uh, culture shaping value. Yeah. I thing I think about Twitter is so much of. The network is very Lindy. So one of the things I'm sure from now is like five years from now, you know, what does that mean?Well that, uh, is that something which has kind of stood the test of time to some extent? And, um, and, uh, well the Lindy effect generally means, I don't think it's using this context with ideas like things which, with withstood the test of time tend to also with some test of time in the future, right? Like, like if we talked to Naim is like, well, people have lifting heavy weights and doing red wine for 2000 years, so let's continue doing that.It's probably a good thing. Um, but, but, but that's Twitter today. What is the future of Twitter? Well, uh, well, I think so one is, I think that's gonna continue to be true, right? 10 years from now, five years from now, it's still gonna be the metic battleground. It's still gonna be the place where ideas are shared, et cetera.Um, you know, I'm very. Unabashedly a a big fan of what Elon, uh, as a person, as a founder and what he's doing at Twitter. And my hope is that, you know, he can kind of canoe that and, you know, he's, you know, and I can't actually predict what he's gonna go Bill, he's kind of talked about it. Maybe that means bringing in other product ideas.Uh, I think he's talked about payments. He's talked about like having like longer form video. Uh, who knows, right? But I do know, like five years from now, it is still gonna be the place of like active conversation where people fight, yell, discuss, and maybe sometimes altogether. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the Twitter, [00:30:58] Is Big Tech Overstaffed?[00:30:58] Dwarkesh: um, conversation has raised a lot of, a lot of questions about how over or understaffed, uh, these big tech companies are, and in particular, um, how many people you can get rid of and the thing basically functions or how fragile are these code bases?And having worked at many of these big tech companies, how, how big is the bus factor, would you guess? Like what, what percentage of people could I fire at the random big tech [00:31:22] Sriram: company? Why? I think, uh, [00:31:23] Aarthi: yeah, I think. That's one way to look at it. I think the way I see it is there are a few factors that go into this, right?Like pre covid, post covid, like through covid everybody became remote, remote teams. As you scaled, it was kind of also hard to figure out what was really going on in different parts of the organization. And I think a lot of inefficiencies were overcome by just hiring more people. It's like, oh, you know what, like that team, yeah, that project's like lagging, let's just like add 10 more people.And that's kind of like it became the norm. Yeah. And I think a lot of these teams just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I think the other part of it was also, um, you lot of how performance ratings and culture of like, moving ahead in your career path. And a lot of these companies were dependent on how big your team was and uh, and so every six months or year long cycle or whatever is your performance review cycle, people would be like, this person instead of looking at what has this person shipped or what has like the impact that this person's got had, uh, the team's done.It became more of like, well this person's got a hundred percent arc or 200% arc and next year they're gonna have a 10% increase and that's gonna be like this much. And you know, that was the conversation. And so a lot of the success and promo cycles and all of those conversations were tied around like number of headcount that this person would get under them as such, which I think is like a terrible way to think about how you're moving up the ladder.Um, you should really, like, even at a big company, you should really be thinking about the impact that you've had and customers you've reached and all of that stuff. And I think at some point people kind of like lost that, uh, and pick the more simpler metric, which just headcount and it's easy. Yeah. And to just scale that kind of thing.So I think now with Elon doing this where he is like cutting costs, and I think Elon's doing this for different set of reasons. You know, Twitter's been losing money and I think it's like driving efficiency. Like this is like no different. Anybody else who like comes in, takes over a business and looks at it and says, wait, we are losing money every day.We have to do something about this. Like, it's not about like, you know, cutting fat for the sake of it or anything. It's like this, this business is not gonna be viable if we keep it going the way it is. Yeah. And just pure economics. And so when he came in and did that, I'm now seeing this, and I'm sure Sheam is too at like at eight 16 Z and like his companies, uh, but even outside, and I see this with like my angel investment portfolio of companies, um, and just founders I talk to where people are like, wait, Elon can do that with Twitter.I really need to do that with my company. And it's given them the permission to be more aggressive and to kind of get back into the basics of why are we building what we are building? These are our customers, this is our revenue. Why do we have these many employees? What do they all do? And not from a place of like being cynical, but from a place of.I want people to be efficient in doing what they do and how do we [00:34:06] Sriram: make that happen? Yeah. I, I stole this, I think somebody said this on Twitter and I officially, he said, Elon has shifted the overturn window of, uh, the playbook for running a company. Um, which is, I think if you look at Twitter, uh, you know, and by the way, I would say, you know, you know the sort of, the warning that shows up, which is don't try this at home before, which is like, so don't try some of these unless you're er and maybe try your own version of these.But, you know, number one is the idea that you, you can become better not through growth, but by cutting things. You can become better, by demanding more out of yourself and the people who work for you. Uh, you, you can become better by hiring a, you know, a higher bar, sitting a higher bar for the talent that you bring into the company and, uh, that you reach into the company.I think at the heart of it, by the way, uh, you know, it's one of the things I've kinda observed from Elon. His relentless focus on substance, which is every condition is gonna be like, you know, the, the meme about what have you gotten done this week is, it kinda makes sense to everything else, which is like, okay, what are we building?What is the thing? Who's the actual person doing the work? As opposed to the some manager two levels a about aggregating, you know, the reports and then telling you what's being done. There is a relentless focus on substance. And my theory is, by the way, I think maybe some of it comes from Iran's background in, uh, space and Tesla, where at the end of the day, you are bound by the physics of the real world, right?If you get something wrong, right, you can, the rockets won't take off or won't land. That'd be a kalo, right? Like what, what's a, the phrase that they use, uh, rapid unplanned disassembly is the word. Right? Which is like better than saying it went kaboom. Uh, but, you know, so the constraints are if, if, you know, if you get something wrong at a social media company, people can tell if you get something really wrong at space with the Tesla.People can tap, right? Like very dramatically so and so, and I think, so there was a relentless focus on substance, right? Uh, being correct, um, you know, what is actually being done. And I think that's external Twitter too. And I think a lot of other founders I've talked to, uh, uh, in, sometimes in private, I look at this and go, oh, there is no different playbook that they have always I instituted or they were used to when they were growing up.We saw this when we were growing up. They're definitely seen some other cultures around the world where we can now actually do this because we've seen somebody else do this. And they don't have to do the exact same thing, you know, Elon is doing. Uh, they don't have to, uh, but they can do their variations of demanding more of themselves, demanding more of the people that work for them.Um, focusing on substance, focusing on speed. Uh, I think our all core element. [00:36:24] Aarthi: I also think over the last few years, uh, this may be controversial, I don't know why it is, but it somehow is that you can no longer talk about hard work as like a recipe for success. And you know, like growing up for us. When people say that, or like our parents say that, we just like kind of roll our eyes and be like, yeah, sure.Like, we work hard, like we get it. Yeah. But I think over the last couple of years, it just became not cool to say that if you work hard, then you can, there is a shot at like finding success. And I think it's kind of refreshing almost, uh, to have Elon come in and say, we are gonna work really hard. We are gonna be really hardcore about how we build things.And it's, it's very simple. Like you have to put in the hours. There is no kind of shortcut to it. And I think it's, it's nice to bring it all tight, all back to the basics. And, uh, I like that, like, I like the fact that we are now talking about it again and it's, it's sad that now talking about working really hard or having beds in your office, we used to do that at MicrosoftYeah. Uh, is now like suddenly really controversial. And so, um, I'm, I'm all for this. Like, you know, it's not for everyone, but if you are that type of person who really enjoys working hard, really enjoys shipping things and building really good things, Then I think you might find a fit in this culture. And I think that's a good thing.Yeah. I, [00:37:39] Sriram: I think there's nothing remarkable that has been built without people just working really hard. It doesn't happen for years and years, but I think for strong, some short-term burst of some really passionate, motivated, smart people working some really, you know, and hard doesn't mean time. It can mean so many different dimensions, but I don't think anything great gets built without that.So, uh, yeah, it's interesting. We [00:37:59] Aarthi: used to like do overnights at Microsoft. Like we'd just like sleep under our desk, um, until the janitor would just like, poke us out of there like, I really need to vacuum your cubicle. Like, get out of here. And so we would just like find another bed or something and just like, go crash on some couch.But it was, those were like some of our fun days, like, and we look back at it and you're like, we sh we built a lot. I think at some point sh I think when I walked over to his cubicle, he was like looking at Windows Source code and we're like, we are looking at Windows source code. This is the best thing ever.I think, I think there's such joy in like, Finding those moments where you like work hard and you're feeling really good about it. [00:38:36] Sriram: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you [00:38:37] Next CEO of Twitter?[00:38:37] Dwarkesh: get working hard and bringing talent into the company, uh, let's say Elon and says Tomorrow, you know what, uh, Riam, I'm, uh, I've got these other three companies that I've gotta run and I need some help running this company.And he says, Sriram would you be down to be the next, [00:38:51] Sriram: uh, next CEO of Twitter Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But I am married to someone. No, uh uh, no, uh uh, you know, you know when, uh, I don't think I was, the answer is absolutely not. And you know this exactly. Fun story. Um, uh, I don't think it says in public before. So when you, when I was in the process, you know, talking to and nor words and, you know, it's, it's not like a, uh, it's not like a very linear process.It's kind of a relationship that kind of develops over time. And I met Mark Andreen, uh, multiple times over the years. They've been having this discussion of like, Hey, do you want to come do venture or do you want to, if you wanna do venture, do you wanna come do with us? And um, and, and one of the things Mark would always tell me is, uh, something like, we would love to have you, but you have to scratch the edge of being an operator first.Um, because there are a lot of, there are a lot of ways VCs fail, uh, operator at VCs fail. Um, and I can get, get into some of them if you're interested, but one of the common ways that they fail is they're like, oh, I really want to go back to, um, building companies. And, uh, and now thing is like antis more than most interest, like really respects entrepreneurship, fraud's the hard of what we do.But he will, like, you have to get that out of a system. You have to be like, okay, I'm done with that word. I want to now do this. Uh, before you know, uh, you want to come over, right? And if you say so, let's have this conversation, but if not, we will wait for you. Right. And a woman telling me this all the time, and at some point of time I decided, uh, that, uh, you know, I just love this modoc.Um, you know, there are many things kind of different about being an operator versus a BC uh, and you kind of actually kind of really train myself in what is actually a new profession. But one of the things is like, you know, you kind of have to be more of a coach and more open to like, working with very different kinds of people without having direct agency.And it's always a very different mode of operation, right? And you have to be like, well, I'm not the person doing the thing. I'm not the person getting the glory. I'm here to fund, obviously, but really help support coach be, uh, a lending hand, be a supporting shoulder, whatever the, uh, the metaphor is, or for somebody else doing the thing.And so you kind of have to have the shift in your brain. And I think sometimes when VCs don't work out, the few operator on VCs don't work out. There are few reasons. Uh, number one reason I would say is when an operator, and I, I hate the word operator by the way, right? It just means you have a regular job.Uh, you know, uh, and, uh, but the number one reason is like when you have a regular job, you know, you're an engineer, you're, you're a product manager, you're a marketer, whatever. , you get feedback every single day about how you're doing. If you're an engineer, you're checking in code or you know your manager, you hire a great person, whatever it is.When you're at Visa, you're not getting direct feedback, right? You know, maybe today what I'm doing now, recording this with you is the best thing ever because some amazing fund is gonna meet it and they're gonna come talk to me, or maybe it's a total waste of time and I should be talking some else. You do have no way of knowing.So you really have to think very differently about how you think about patients, how we think about spending your time, and you don't get the dopamine of like, oh, I'm getting this great reinforcement loop. Um, the second part of it is because of that lack of feedback loop, you often don't know how well you're doing.Also, you don't have that fantastic product demo or you're like, you know, if an engineer like, oh, I got this thing working, the builder is working, it's 10 x faster, or this thing actually works, whatever the thing is, you don't get that feedback loop, uh, because that next great company that, you know, the next Larry and Sergey or Brian Armstrong might walk in through your door or Zoom meeting tomorrow or maybe two years from now.So you don't really have a way to know. Um, so you kind of have to be, you have a focus on different ways to do, uh, get. Kind of figured out how well you're doing. The third part of it is, uh, you know, the, uh, the feedback loops are so long where, uh, you know, you, you can't test it. When I was a product manager, you would ship things, something you, if you don't like it, you kill it, you ship something else.At, at our firm in, you invest in somebody, you're working with them for a decade, if not longer, really for life in some ways. So you are making much more intense, but much less frequent decisions as opposed to when you're in a regular job, you're making very frequent, very common decisions, uh, every single day.So, uh, I get a lot of differences and I think, you know, sometimes, uh, you know, folks who, who are like a former CEO or former like VP product, uh, uh, I talk a lot of them sometimes who went from, came to BC and then went back and they either couldn't adapt or didn't like it, or didn't like the emotions of it.And I had to really convince myself that okay. Hopefully wouldn't fate those problems. I probably, maybe some other problems. And, uh, uh, so yes, the long way of saying no, , [00:43:13] Why Don't More Venture Capitalists Become Founders?[00:43:13] Dwarkesh: um, the desk partly answer another question I had, which was, you know, there is obviously this pipeline of people who are founders who become venture capitalists.And it's interesting to me. I would think that the other end or the converse of that would be just as common because if you're, if you're an angel investor or venture capitalist, you've seen all these companies, you've seen dozens of companies go through all these challenges and then you'd be like, oh, I, I understand.[00:43:36] Sriram: Wait, why do you think more VCs driven apart? You have some strong opinions of this . [00:43:40] Dwarkesh: Should more venture capitalists and investors become founders? I think [00:43:43] Aarthi: they should. I don't think they will. Ouch. I dunno, why not? Um, I think, uh, look, I think the world is better with more founders. More people should start companies, more people should be building things.I fundamentally think that's what needs to happen. Like our single biggest need is like, we just don't have enough founders. And we should just all be trying new things, building new projects, all of that. Um, I think for venture capital is, I think what happens, and this is just my take, I don't know if Farram agrees with it, but, um, I think they see so much from different companies.And if you're like really successful with what you do as a vc, you are probably seeing hundreds of companies operate. You're seeing how the sausage is being made in each one of them. Like an operating job. You kind of sort of like have this linear learning experience. You go from one job to the other.Here you kind of sort of see in parallel, like you're probably on like 50, 60 boards. Uh, and oftentimes when it comes to the investor as like an issue, it is usually a bad problem. Um, and you kind of see like you, you know, you kind of see how every company, what the challenges are, and every company probably has like, you know, the best companies we know, I've all had this like near death experience and they've come out of that.That's how the best founders are made. Um, you see all of that and I think at some point you kind of have this fear of like, I don't know. I just don't think I wanna like, bet everything into this one startup. One thing, I think it's very hard to have focus if you've honed your skillset to be much more breath first and go look at like a portfolio of companies being helpful to every one of them.And I see Sure. And do this every day where I, I have no idea how he does it, but key context, which is every 30 minutes. Yeah. And it's crazy. Like I would go completely and say, where if you told me board meeting this founder pitch, oh, sell this operating role for this portfolio company. Second board meeting, third, board meeting founder, pitch founder pitch founder pitch.And that's like, you know, all day, every day nonstop. Um, that's just like, you, you, I don't think you can like, kind of turn your mindset into being like, I'm gonna clear up my calendar and I'm just gonna like work on this one thing. Yeah. And it may be successful, it may not be, but I'm gonna give it my best shot.It's a very, very different psychology. I don't know. What do you [00:45:57] Sriram: think? Well, Well, one of my partners Triess to say like, I don't know what VCs do all day. The job is so easy, uh, uh, you know, they should start complaining. I mean, being a founder is really hard. Um, and I think, you know, there's a part of it where the VCs are like, oh, wait, I see how hard it is.And I'm like, I'm happy to support, but I don't know whether I can go through with it. So, because it's just really hard and which is kind of like why we have like, so much, uh, sort of respect and empathy, uh, for the whole thing, which is, I, [00:46:20] Aarthi: I do like a lot of VCs, the best VCs I know are people who've been operators in the past because they have a lot of empathy for what it takes to go operate.Um, and I've generally connected better with them because you're like, oh, okay, you're a builder. You've built these things, so, you know, kind of thing. Yeah. Um, but I do think a lot more VCs should become [00:46:38] Sriram: founders than, yeah. I, I think it's some of the couple of other things which happened, which is, uh, uh, like Arthur said, like sometimes, uh, you know, when we see you kind of, you see, you kind of start to pattern match, like on.And you sometimes you analyze and, and you kind of, your brain kind of becomes so focused on context switching. And I think when need a founder, you need to kind of just dedicate, you know, everything to just one idea. And it, it's not just bbc sometimes with academics also, where sometimes you are like a person who's supporting multiple different kinds of disciplines and context switching between like various speech students you support.Uh, but it's very different from being in the lab and working on one problem for like long, long years. Right. So, um, and I think it's kind of hard to then context switch back into just doing the exact, you know, just focus on one problem, one mission, day in and day out. So I think that's hard, uh, and uh, but you should be a founder.Yeah, I think, yeah, I think more people should try. [00:47:32] Role of Boards[00:47:32] Dwarkesh: . Speaking of being on boards, uh, what the FTX Saga has raised some questions about what is like the role of a board, even in a startup, uh, stage company, and you guys are on multiple boards, so I'm curious how you think about, there's a range of between micromanaging everything the CEO does to just rubber stamping everything the CEO does.Where, what is the responsibility of a board and a startup? [00:47:54] Aarthi: What, what, what are the, this is something I'm really curious about too. I'm [00:47:57] Sriram: just, well, I just wanna know on the FDX soccer, whether we are gonna beat the FTX episode in interviews in terms of view your podcast, right? Like, so if you folks are listening, right?Like let's get us to number one. So what you YouTube like can subscriber, they're already listening. [00:48:10] Aarthi: What do you mean? Get us [00:48:10] Sriram: to number one? Okay, then, then spread the word, right? Like, uh, don't [00:48:13] Aarthi: watch other episodes. It's kinda what you [00:48:15] Sriram: should, I mean, if there's [00:48:16] Dwarkesh: like some sort of scandal with a 16 Z, we could definitely be to fdx.[00:48:21] Sriram: Uh, uh, yeah, I think it's gonna, well, it's gonna be really hard to read that one. Uh, , uh, uh, for for sure. Uh, uh, oh my goodness. Um, uh, but no, [00:48:29] Aarthi: I'm, I'm genuinely curious about [00:48:31] Sriram: these two. Well, uh, it's a few things, you know, so the multiple schools of thought, I would say, you know, there's one school of thought, which is the, uh, uh, you know, which I don't think I totally subscribe to, but I think some of the other later stages, especially public market folks that I work with sometimes subscribe to, which is the only job of a, uh, board is to hire and fire the ceo.I don't think I really subscribe to that. I think because we deal with more, uh, early stage venture, um, and our job is like, uh, you know, like lot of the companies I work with are in a cdc c, b, you know, they have something working, but they have a lot long way to go. Um, and hopefully this journey, which goes on for many, many years, and I think the best way I thought about it is to, people would say like, you want to be.Wave form dampener, which is, uh, you know, for example, if the company's kind of like soaring, you want to kind of be like kind the check and balance of what? Like, hey, okay, what do we do to, uh, you know, um, uh, to make sure we are covering our bases or dotting the is dotting the, crossing The ts be very kind of like careful about it because the natural gravitational pool of the company is gonna take it like one direct.On the other hand, uh, if the company's not doing very well and everybody's beating us, beating up about it, you're, you know, your cust you're not able to close deals. The press is beating you up. You want to be the person who is supportive to the ceo, who's rallying, everybody helping, you know, convince management to stay, helping convince, close host, hire.So, um, there are a lot of things, other things that go into being a board member. Obviously there's a fiscal responsibility part of things, and, um, you know, um, because you kind of represent so many stakeholders. But I think at the heart of it, I kind of think about, uh, you know, how do I sort of help the founder, uh, the founder and kind of dampen the waveform.Um, the other Pinteresting part was actually the board meetings. Uh, Themselves do. Uh, and I do think like, you know, about once a year or, uh, so like that there's every kind of, there's, there's almost always a point every 18 months or so in a company's lifetime where you have like some very decisive, interesting moment, right?It could be good, it could be bad. And I think those moments can be, uh, really, really pivotal. So I think there's, there's huge value in showing up to board meetings, being really prepared, uh, uh, where you've done your homework, you, you know, you've kind of had all the conversations maybe beforehand. Um, and you're coming into add real value, like nothing kind of annoying me if somebody's just kind of showing up and, you know, they're kind of maybe cheering on the founder once or twice and they kind of go away.So I don't think you can make big difference, but, uh, you know, I think about, okay, how are we sort of like the waveform, the, you know, make sure the company, [00:50:58] Aarthi: but I guess the question then is like, should startups have better corporate governance compared to where we are today? Would that have avoided, like, say the FTX [00:51:08] Sriram: saga?No, I mean, it's, I mean, we, I guess there'll be a legal process and you'll find out right when the FTX case, nobody really knows, you know, like, I mean, like what level of, uh, who knew what, when, and what level of deceptions, you know, deception, uh, uh, you know, unfolded, right? So, uh, it, yeah. Maybe, but you know, it could have been, uh, it could have been very possible that, you know, uh, somebody, somebody just fakes or lies stuff, uh, lies to you in multiple ways.[00:51:36] Aarthi: To,

CEO and Co-Founder of Figma, Dylan Field, joins us to talk about the collaborative design tool, the importance of design, the early stages of Figma, and more. Links https://twitter.com/zoink https://twitter.com/figma https://www.figma.com Tell us what you think of PodRocket We want to hear from you! We want to know what you love and hate about the podcast. What do you want to hear more about? Who do you want to see on the show? Our producers want to know, and if you talk with us, we'll send you a $25 gift card! If you're interested, schedule a call with us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) or you can email producer Kate Trahan at kate@logrocket.com (mailto:kate@logrocket.com) Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Dylan Field.

In der Rubrik “Investments & Exits” begrüßen wir heute Bastian Hasslinger, Vice President von Picus Capital. Bastian kommentiert die Runde von OroraTech und TreeCard.OroraTech, der Münchner Anbieter für satelliten-basierte Wärmebilderfassung, hat mit privaten Investor*innen und zusätzlicher Co-Finanzierung durch öffentliche Geldgeber*innen seine Series-A-Runde um 15 Millionen Euro erweitert. OroraTech plant bereits im Mai 2023 seine zweite Wärmebildkamera ins Weltall bringen um Waldbrände zu identifizieren. Die Runde wurde von Lead-Investor Edaphon, einem in Belgien ansässigen Impact-Investor, zusammen mit den bestehenden Investoren Findus Ventures, Ananda Impact Ventures, Wachstumsfonds Bayern 2, ConActivity, APEX Ventures, SpaceTec Capital und Industrieexperten Ingo Baumann und Clemens Kaiser abgeschlossen. Zusätzliches Geld wurde durch Aufträge und Förderungen der Europäischen Weltraumorganisation (ESA) und des Freistaates Bayern eingesammelt.  Das britische Fintech TreeCard hat eine Series-A-Finanzierungsrunde in Höhe von 23 Millionen US-Dollar erhalten. TreeCard verspricht  Bäume zu pflanzen, wenn Kunden mit ihrer hölzernen Debitkarte bezahlen. Die Bäume werden in Zusammenarbeit mit der gemeinnützigen Suchmaschine Ecosia gepflanzt. Die Finanzierungsrunde wird von den US-amerikanischen VC-Firmen Valar Ventures, Climate Tech VC World Fund und EQT Ventures geleitet, unter Beteiligung von Seedcamp und Episode 1 sowie einigen Business Angels: Figma-Gründer Dylan Field und DoNotPay-CEO Joshua Browder.

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, which makes a very popular design tool that allows designers and their collaborators to all work together right in a web browser. You know how multiple people can edit together in Google Docs? Figma is that for design work. We just redesigned The Verge; we used Figma extensively throughout that process. So for years, people have been waiting on the inevitable Figma vs. Adobe standoff since Figma was such a clear upstart competitor to Photoshop and Illustrator and the rest. Well, buckle up because in September, Adobe announced that it was buying Figma for $20 billion. Figma is going to remain independent inside Adobe, but you know, it's a little weird. So I wanted to talk to Dylan about the deal, why he's doing it, how he made the decision to sell, and what things he can do as part of Adobe that he couldn't do as an independent company. Dylan's also a pretty expansive thinker, so after we talked about his company getting the “fuck you” money from Adobe, we talked about making VR Figma for the metaverse and AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or the kind of AI that can fully think for itself. This episode takes a turn. I think you're going to like it. Okay, Dylan Field, CEO of Figma. Here we go. Links: Welcome to the new Verge Adobe to acquire Figma in a deal worth $20 billion A New Collaboration with Adobe Designers worry Adobe won't let Figma flourish WebGL - Wikipedia How big companies kill ideas — and how to fight back, with Tony Fadell - Decoder Dylan Field on Twitter: "Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe" College Dropout Turns Thiel Fellowship Into a $2 Billion Figma Fortune Generative adversarial network (GAN) - Wikipedia       GPT-3 - Wikipedia Is VR the next frontier in fitness? - Decoder Artificial general intelligence - Wikipedia   Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23209862 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Jackson Bierfeldt. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week Haje Jan Kamps, stepping in for Darrell, talks with Dominic-Madori Davis about how conservative VCs are shaping the startup landscape and, by extension, the world. He also talked with Taylor Hatmaker about all things Elon, from his cringey tweets to his most recent flip-flopping on will-he-or-won't he buy Twitter. And as always, we'll catch you up on the tech news you may have missed this week.TechCrunch Disrupt is coming up on October 18-20, live in San Francisco. We'll be hearing from guests like Dylan Field, Serena Williams, and Kevin Hart. Use code TCPOD all one word to get 15% Off Passes. Articles from the episode:It's official, Elon Musk is buying TwitterHere are some of the cringiest revelations in the Elon Musk text dumpJust before Musk backtracked, a judge said Twitter could hunt for secret chats with whistleblowerConservative capitalists are funding their vision of the future Other news from the week:Let's not defend Kim Kardashian for shilling cryptoKim Kardashian charged by SEC for pushing crypto, reaches $1.26M settlementTesla's robot is a real robot now, not just a guy in a suitSpotify cancels 11 original podcasts, lays off under 5% of podcast staff

Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I'm with Atlanta Ventures. Individual On the Move: Sometimes the 2nd, 3rd or 4th person at a company can create a transformational force needed to get the product in market. I can't tell you how many times I've seen or heard how the first go-to-market leader connects with a technical founding team and the sparks fly. Well, this past week I met with the ideal go-to-market individual who wants to be that 3rd team member right after the founding team has built out the minimum viable product in an interesting and fast growing market. After learning more about this individual's story, I can attest he would be a great addition in the early days based off his sales results, technical understanding, and extensive experience bringing products to market. If you or you and a co-founder are listening and looking for your first go-to-market team member, email me at jon.birdsong@atlantaventures.com and I'll put y'all in touch.  Event of the Week: The premiere conference on Bitcoin is next week. Now I know several folks may be down on digital currency right now, and quite candidly it is not an area we have place much focus at Atlanta Ventures, however, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it here as there is a big sentiment in the waters that digital currencies are going through the same cycle that the internet did after 2001 bubble popped. If you're looking to understand bitcoin, next week is a great opportunity in Atlanta.  Company Coming Up: This company coming up is headquartered out of Charlotte and it's called Spendly. Imagine overpaying for merchant services for years and having now simple or easy way to shop around or price compare. Millions of SMB's are doing it daily, right now. Spendly's software lets you easily compare your current financial services ranging from payroll, insurance, lines of credit, retirement plans, and much more. In three easy steps, you'll have quotes from their trusted network of providers comparing and contrasting each service you're assessing. Check out Spendly if you're wondering how competitive your current financial products are today.     Beta Product of the Week: The beta product of the week comes from Birmingham and it's called ClearMindNow. CEO, Liz Read and team are solving the cumbersome, invasive, and unaccountable process for drug testing. Their solution helps families across the country monitor and test family members in a safe, simple, and verified way through their technology. How it works is you open up the ClearMindNow App, and through facial recognition confirms the participants identity. From there, the software records you administering a test sent to you by ClearMindNow where one swabs their mouth and tongue. Upon completion, you take the swab, place it back in the holder and show the camera your test results – similar to a rapid Covid test. As the United States battles the fentanyl crisis, and more, ClearMindNow provides another way to combat the disease affecting millions upon millions Americans. ClearMindNow is an up and coming solution to put on your radar.   Concepts of the Week: Over the past few weeks in the Atlanta Ventures office, we've discussed the topic of how long it takes to accelerate from start date, to finding product market fit, to building a repeatable, scalable sales process. For example, the Figma team, which just sold to Adobe for $20B spent 5 years building their product before they made their first dollar in revenue. Figs, the high end scrub company spent 3-4 years before generating over $1M in ARR. Today they are a publicly traded company valued in the billions. One of the hardest aspects of entrepreneurship is maintaining the faith in the product or the market or the team during these years towards scale. Investor David Sacks calls this “The Wilderness Years.” We've linked to one his posts elaborating more on these intrepid years of a startups' journey, but how does an entrepreneur know they are successfully navigating the Wilderness years? The most simple answer in the early days is the rate of customer feedback which is a direct indication of the authentic demand your product is solving. For example, even though Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma spent years, years y'all, not generating revenue, there was enough natural product demand, through feedback and excitement in the market. One unique caveat with Figma is their self-signon go-to-market strategy. It takes time to build that foundation, much more so than picking up the phone or sending a cold email, introducing and urging people to try and use your product. Regardless, if you are an entrepreneur in the Wilderness years, it is vital to be extremely honest with yourself to assess not only the overall market potential, but the velocity of market feedback and product iteration, as that is the best indicator of progress in one of the toughest stages in startups.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Spendly Event of the Week: Tab Conference - The Atlanta Bitcoin Conference Beta Product of the Week: ClearMindNow Concept of the Week: The Wilderness Period 

Zach Lloyd is the Founder and CEO of Warp who's mission is to elevate developer productivity by building a blazingly fast terminal for the modern age. Warp is modernising the command line experience to make it more intuitive and collaborative for modern developers and teams, turning the terminal into a real platform to enable engineering workflows. To date they've raised $23 million across a $6 million Seed round, led by GV and a $17 million Series A, led by Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma. Before Warp, Zach was the interim CTO at TIME after spending over 7 years as a Principal Engineer at Google for the Google Docs Suite. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

We spoke to Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field earlier this year, and while we didn't know at the time that the startup would be entering into a deal to be acquired by Adobe for north of $20 billion, the lessons that Field shared around his journey building Figma and bringing on the right investors are definitely extra resonant now that the acquisition has been announced. Please enjoy this ‘greatest hit' in light of the news!If you love live conversations with founders, you'll love TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from October  18-20. Use code FOUND for 15% off your ticket.  Subscribe to Found to hear more stories from founders each week.Connect with us:On TwitterOn InstagramVia email: found@techcrunch.comCall us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, started the company when he was 20 years old when he had no idea if anyone would see the value in making design a multiplayer game let alone that his company become the Google Docs of design. He chats with Darrell and Jordan about how his leadership style has evolved, how he handles the changing company culture as Figma grows, and how the nature of design has rapidly changed into the collaborative work it is now.Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND.Connect with us:On TwitterOn InstagramVia email: found@techcrunch.comCall us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618

Charles Werner, your host, welcomes Blake Resnick, CEO of BRINC Drones, to today's episode, to talk about the background and the history of BRINC Drones and its bond with public safety operations. Blake Resnick has raised over $27 million from an impressive roster of investors including Index Ventures, Sam Altman, Figma's Dylan Field, and Scale AI's Alexandr Wangn to make BRINC Drones a reality. Blake aims to change the way the police and rescue teams operate during emergencies and, in this episode, he shares his journey from his first cold call to working along with the busiest SWAT team.   Key Takeaways: [1:12] Blake talks about himself, the man behind BRINC Drones. [2:47] What was the catalyst that made Blake become interested in drones? [5:15] After the Las Vegas shooting Blake started to explore the use of technology in these kinds of scenarios. [6:15] Blake shares examples of how technology has been contributing to saving lives. [6:35] How was Blake's first conversation with someone in public safety and law enforcement to start exploring how technology can be used in that field? [10:36] What was Blake's next step after having the prototype? [14:03] Blake shares about the second time he tried his prototypes and how he started to be on-call to work along with the busiest SWAT teams. [16:29] Blake talks about the first incident that he went on. [18:27] Blake shares the most exciting of his first times working with the SWAT team. [24:47] Blake shares how a partnership was developed between the SWAT team and himself. [25:29] What happens now about the continuous evolution of BRINC Drones? [27:40] Blake talks about how BRINC Drones are progressing. [29:55] Blake is making drones to be as easy as possible to use. [31:35] BRINC Drones has an extremely close relationship with customers in order to know the improvements that need to take place. [33:00] BRINC Drones is a US company on a Chinese dominated market. [33:49] It is a drone, it is a camera and it is a phone! [35:32] Listening is just as important as seeing when using drones. [38:26] Blake talks about his team, which he is greatly proud of. [40:20] What is next for BRINC Drones? [42:12] Blake talks about DJI M300. [43:44] Blake speaks about his contribution in the incident where a Surfside condominium collapsed in Miami. [51:08] Blake shares why the mission on the Surfside condominium collapse was special to him. [51:47] How was that experience for the pilots? [53:23] Blake talks about the idea of building a BRINC response team. [54:33] Blake talks to the safety public agencies that are thinking of buying BRINC drones. [57:10] BRINC drones are the only ones that have a glass breaking capability.   Mentioned in this episode: Airborne International Response Team AIRT is the leading 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supporting Drones For Good and Public Safety UAS Become a member of Drone Responders for free. AIRT and DRONERESPONDERS 2020 Drones in Public Safety Survey Drone Responders Events  

In this episode of Uniquely Led, Dylan Field, CEO & co-founder of Figma, shares his journey of going from intern to CEO at the age of 20, discovering the difference between leadership and management, and the importance of being a low-ego leader. He discusses Figma's culture of growth, which focuses on bringing in amazing people and ensuring they achieve their full potential.

The latest episode of the Distributed podcast pairs Dylan Field, Figma's CEO and Co-founder, and guest host Connie Yang, Head of Payments Design at Stripe. Join a discussion on design, instilling remote culture, and the digital economy, including Field's perspective on the role of design in technology. “We've gone from a physical economy to a digital economy. I don't think these are new trends or new things that happen but now, all of a sudden it happened all at once, and accelerated massively,” he says.More Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.

In this episode, Jon and Bryan talk to Atlanta product designer, Chelsea Kinley, about our third monster: The Hoverer. It possesses our unfortunate souls at times. We just want to collaborate and keep the project moving, but some of us grow a few extra heads and start lurking behind our team. Chelsea uncovers super helpful tips on how to deal with The Hoverer, including a plea for all of us to focus on empathy and communication. Additionally, Jon forgets to press record for a while, and Chelsea talks about her favorite monster and monster slayer from the manga turned anime, Attack on Titan. We also throw out some innovative Figma suggestions for Dylan Field, and Bryan gets attacked by a spider.

Figma has transformed the silo'd world of design into a collaborative, multiplayer game. Dylan Field, CEO and Co-Founder of Figma, shares his journey building the product and how he dropped out of college and ultimately scaled Figma to a $2B valuation. At YML, we use Figma across all disciplines for the end to end experience — not just design. It's become a vital tool in building world-class digital products for both our team and our clients. Lastly, we're excited to welcome YML's Chief Creative Officer, Stephen Clements, as a co-host for this episode. Show Notes:  1:59: The impact Figma has on YML 9:18: The early experiments before Figma was born 14:27: Building a multiplayer design tool when people insisted it wouldn't work 19:26: Crafting a culture that stays the same through massive growth 25:11: How FigJam is inviting even more collaboration between teams 32:19: Why Figma waited years to start charging customers 33:20: Framework for building culture when the team is remote  49:49: The Sprint

Today, On Deck is announcing that it's raising a $20 million Series A led by Keith Rabois at Founders Fund with participation from Learn Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya, Slack Fund, Village Global, Eric Yuan, Fred Ehrsam, Allison Picken's The New Normal Fund, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, Adam D'Angelo, Jen Rubio, Elad Gill, Julia DeWahl, Henry Ward, Afton Vechery, Jules Walter, Eric Su, Julia Lipton, Scott Belsky, Anthony Pompliano, Bloomberg Beta, Dylan Field, Aarti Ramamurthy, and many, many more members of the On Deck community. We cover why On Deck has a chance to build a Stanford for the internet: On Deck Investment Thesis. Natively Integrated Education. Platform and Team Constellation. The On Deck Opportunity. You can read the full original post and subscribe at notboring.co. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/notboring/message

A SaaS platform company in the Solar Power Industry, Prescinto, has raised $3.5M in seed funding. Prescinto is looking at revolutionizing the solar power industry by improving efficiency of solar plants using AI and Machine Learning driven platforms that will help Solar Plants identify their root issues for underperformance. The Funding round was led by Inflection Point Ventures along with Venture Catalysts, Mumbai Angels and Lets Venture. This infusion of finances will help realize Prescinto's goals of improving Solar Power plants globally.UK based Home Care SaaS company that uses Machine learning has raised £4.5 million pre-Series A funding. The funding round organized by West Hill Capital was 50% oversubscribed. The funds will be used to roll out Machine Learning enabled care solutions for those in independent living conditions to help in efficiency of care given.As one of the most happening occurrences currently in the world, NFT marketplaces are exploding in popularity as collectors wade into the trading of nonfungible tokens on the blockchain. OpenSea, a startup in the field that was launched in 2017, has announced that it has bagged its latest funding round of $23M led by Andreessen Horowitz along with participation from other angels and firms including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Dylan Field and Linda Xie.Slapdash, is seeking to increase performance in the workplace by aiming to carve out a new niche for itself among workplace software tools. Sources say that slapdash has raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors that include S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures, UP2398 and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies like Patreon, Docker and Zynga.Kuda Technologies, has just announced that it has received $25M in Series A funds.The round was led by Peter Theil's, Valar Ventures, along with Target Global and other unnamed investors. Valar, a company that has invested in a number of fintech startups, is funding an African Startup for the first time. Kuda had raised a seed round of $10M led by Target Global just four months ago and is estimated to be the largest ever seed round raised by a startup out of Africa. Kuda's CEO, Ogundeyi said in an interview that they plan to use the new funds to continue expanding its credit offerings, and add more integrations as well as move into other markets.Fortify raises $20 M in Series B funding towards its composite manufacturing 3D Printing. Other companies in the field including Markforged, Desktop Metal and new-comer Mantel have all made big announcements recently. Now Fortify is making the round with a significant raise of a $20 million dollar Series B equity round. This round was led by Cota Capital with participation from Accel Partners, Neotribe Ventures and Prelude Ventures.Founded in 2018, Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban.

Two of the most important sales in NFT history happened last week: Beeple’s $69 million auction through Christie’s, and the $7.5 million sale of CryptoPunk #7804. Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, was 7804’s previous owner. He joins the show to talk about what selling the punk meant to him, why crypto art is important — and why it’s booming right now — and where the real art lies.For more on the topics in this episode:Dylan Field on TwitterCryptoPunk #7804LarvaLabs’ Autoglyph projectMore on DAOsHow Dapper Labs scored NBA crypto millionsBeeple’s EverydaysFor all the links and stories, head to Source Code’s homepage.

For the record, I don't own any crypto art or endorse it. But there's clearly a movement, Dylan is constantly ahead of the rest of us, and this was a great speech. Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5LapixLbk (59 mins in) The sale: https://twitter.com/cryptopunksbot/status/1369812648288804865/photo/1 Vincenzo Peruggia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenzo_Peruggia Peruggia's statement: https://twitter.com/peruggia_v/status/1370258347341934593 Dylan's comments: https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1370649011821060097 Help share this clip: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1371913108684349441Sriram Krishnan: [00:00:00] Dylan Field is really very well known in our industry for being the founder and CEO of Figma. But what a lot of people may not know is he's been involved with crypto and especially CryptoPunks since the very beginning, which I think in some ways could be the beginning of where a lot of this art moment came from, and Dylan, you had quite the interesting week too, which I'll let you describe.So can you talk to us about just crypto art, CryptoPunks? You know, your profile picture, your history there, and also what happened this year. Dylan Field: [00:00:31] So for those who don't know, CryptoPunks was the first Ethereum crypto art project. It was created in 2017 by two visionary artists, Matt hall, and John Watkinson.There are only 10,000 CryptoPunks, which anyone could claim for free in the early days. And of those 10,000 CryptoPunks. There are only 88 zombie punks, 24 apes, nine aliens, and exactly one alien punk smoking a pipe. His name is 7804. And I personally believe that in 100 years, we'll look back on 7804 as the Mona Lisa of digital art.My relationship with 7804 started in January, 2018. When I bought it for 12 ETH, or 15 K USD. At that point, most CryptoPunks traded for about $100 or $200. So why would I pay 15 K for this picture of an alien? It wasn't just how rare it was though. It was rare. 7804 compelled me.It had gravitas. I found it to be absolutely magnetic and I had a sense that others out there would feel the same way. I also believe that the question of "what is art" would propel the crypto art movement forward. So: what is art and what does it mean to own art? What does it mean to have relationship with art in the case of crypto punks?The answers to all these questions are unclear, which is part of why I personally find the project so, so fascinating. Let's start with "what is art". You might say that crypto punks art piece is the algorithm. Matt and John used generate images. Or we might claim that the art piece is each individual punk. I personally believe that the actual art piece is the CryptoPunks community, which has been feverously speculating on and trading punks and discussing funds over the past three and a half years.And this might sound absurd to people listening, but many of us in the community have formed deep relationships with our punks. We set them to our avatars. We discuss them ad nauseum. We even dream about them. The punks become deeply intertwined with our identities. They effectively function as mass.So why I sell 7804? To be completely honest is because I wanted to see 7804 become the Patron Saint of digital art, or perhaps the patron alien, if you will. It bothered me that it was not universally acknowledged that 7804 was the best, most valuable crypto punk. It bothered me that it was not a symbol for the entire crypto art movement.And there's a paradox because 7804 can not be seen as the symbol for the crypto art movement, unless it changes hands. So I priced it at 4,200 ETH, which was extremely aggressive. It's still a believable price point for someone who resonated with 7804, as much as I did, knowing that it was bought for that price point, it would bring even more attention to her defense, to the project.And also the 7804 as a piece of art. 7804 was purchased earlier this week by a mysterious figure known only as Peruggia. Peruggia is of course a reference to Vincenzo Peruggia who stole the Mona Lisa on August 21st 1911 and this theft was heavily covered in the news and made the Mona Lisa, the most known piece of art in the world. Since purchasing 7804 Peruggia has made a beautiful statement on Twitter, which I encourage all of you to read.And I, as I reflect on it,, 7804 has been surprisingly emotional for me, which I think speaks to its power. It's emotional not because I think I could get more money from it, rather because I had a relationship with the work. As I reflected on that sale. I also felt a very deep bond. To Peruggia, the new owner of 7804 and I don't know who it is. I don't know what their gender is or what ethnicity they are or they live. But I have finally found someone who appreciate 7804 as much as I do. So with that it's time for me to change my mask. Sriram Krishnan: [00:04:30] This is like an Apple keynote.Dylan Field: [00:04:34] Hopefully it's updated for all of you. If you're out there listening, enjoy your time with 7804, but please know that owning 7804 is a paradox and possibly a curse. Because if you appreciate 7804 as much as I do, then you'll stop at nothing to make sure it's seen by everyone as the most valuable piece of digital art.And because of that, your time will be limited with it. And when you sell, which you will, you will forever live with the question of why you parted ways with the Digital Mona Lisa.Sriram Krishnan: [00:05:19] That was fantastic, man.

This week on the program, a conversation with Figma Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Field. Figma is a collaborative design tool trusted by companies like Slack, Twitter, Dropbox, Square, and the New York Times. In this episode, we discuss Dylan's experience dropping out of University and becoming a Theil Fellow, raising 4 million dollars at 19 to start Figma and lessons learned as the CEO of a design Unicorn, that also happens to be taking on tech behemoths, like Adobe in the process. This conversation was recorded on February 22, 2021, thanks for listening! Mentioned in this EP: Check out the Thiel Fellowship Stay in the loop: Visit My Website Follow me on Twitter Follow me on Instagram Follow me on TikTok

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a collaborative, online design tool which has taken the world by storm. With a most recent valuation of more than $2B and bakers like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Greylock, Figma has been one of the most successful companies building tools for creators. In our conversation, we dive into the principles Figma is built on, how they created multi-player for design tools, and the growing importance of design in business. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dylan Field.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content check out https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/375923/field-the-growing-importance-of-design   DocSend is a document sharing platform that enables companies to share business-critical documents with ease and get real-time actionable analytics. With DocSend’s security and control, startup founders, investors, business development executives, and financial professionals can drive business outcomes that have a lasting impact. Start for free at www.docsend.com.   Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide go to https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes.    Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week.  Sign up here - https://www.joincolossus.com/newsletter.   Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Follow Colossus on Twitter at @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:2:04] – [First question] – His decision to and application for the Thiel Fellowship [00:3:23] – What makes his co-founder Evan so good [00:4:15] – The Thiel Fellowship interview process [00:5:26] – Creating better opportunities for open ended learning in education             [00:6:12] – Why Software Is Eating The World [00:7:48] – Importance and types of independent thought as they built Figma [00:10:00] – Early stages of forming Figma [00:12:03] – The market of designers and what Figma does [00:15:57] – His principles of good design             [00:17:36] – Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle [Youtube]             [00:17:49] - Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction [00:18:12] – Future of design tools [00:19:45] – Design as a multiplayer concept and surprises that have come from it [00:21:40] – Threshold to know when product-market fit occurred [00:24:11] – Lessons for pricing something effectively [00:25:48] – Biggest challenge growing the business for him [00:26:58] – What he’s learned as a manager since starting Figma [00:28:38] – Lessons in effective recruiting [00:31:49] – Payoff of hiring the right partner [00:33:01] – The chapters/stages of Figma [00:34:38] – What has led to success in terms of the distribution of Figma [00:35:56] – Hardest thing to copy about Figma [00:36:47] – Dealing with customer support and unhappy users [00:38:08] – Their Communities platform and why it’s important for the business [00:39:02] – Learning about and from their competitors [00:41:50] – The landscape of software design tools [00:43:43] – Interesting creator tools [00:44:31] – What would be the key levers that lead to explosive growth for Figma [00:45:57] – Global trends he is most curious in [00:47:21] – Creating a more private digital world [00:49:33] – Thoughts or advice for people building something new [00:50:57] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Brian Vallelunga of Doppler.com a platform for managing environment variables (e.g. API keys) for developers. In this episode, Brian talks about raising a pre-seed round from Kleiner while he was still working at Uber, applying to Y Combinator for the 6th or 7th time, pitching a long-term massive vision (even in the early days), resisting the temptation of initial offers and the search for "partners not capital," how he made his investor intros go viral, pitching Peter Thiel, the importance of managing dilution, and much more. The Company raised raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital. Abstract Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Soma Capital, Nat Friedman, Aaron Levie, Dylan Field, Ben Porterfield, Jeremy Stoppelman, Kevin Hartz, Jeff Holden, Greg Brockman, Jeffrey Queisser and Peter Thiel also participated in the round. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $2.5 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at www.foundersuite.com

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. 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 foresee 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 As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

One of the coolest new companies in the space of design, Figma has quickly become the dominant player in its space, with its highly collaborative, cloud-based design & prototyping functionalities.We talk about Noah’s early passion for design, his varied design experiences, joining Figma and building the highly talented teams making design accessible to everyone!This should be a fun one for anyone who loves design across the physical & digital world!Support the show (https://thingshavechanged.substack.com/)

Craig Mod is a Japan-based author and photographer. His books include Kissa by Kissa, Koya Bound, and Art Space Tokyo. He is a MacDowell, VCCA, and Ragdale fellow. His writing and photography has appeared in Eater, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications. SUPPORT CRAIG MOD:Become a Special Projects Member and support Craig's creative work!CONNECT WITH CRAIG MOD:Follow Craig Mod on TwitterFollow Craig Mod on InstagramSign up for Craig Mod's monthly newsletter 'Roden'Sign up for 'Ridgeline' - weekly newsletter on walking, Japan, literature, and photographyIf you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts, Spotify  or share the episode with a friend. Thank you!

Monopoly, oligopoly, cartel. All three of those words can describe the (not so) modern education system today, given the cost structures, economics, and accreditation capture -- in everything from who can and can't start a new university (when was the last time a significant change happened there anyway?!) to where government funding really goes to the student loan and debt crisis.Yet degrees do matter, just not for the reasons we think. So what are the tradeoffs -- when it comes to the "right" school, making money, and assessing skills objectively -- between what's been called "hard" (B.S.) and "soft" (B.A.) degrees? What's the best book on career advice, and what advice does Marc Andreessen -- who went to a public university, worked on a revolutionary project there, and started a company right after -- have for students (and others contemplating change in their careers)... and especially for those considering dropping out, delaying, or skipping college altogether?Andreessen shares his thoughts on the purpose, past and present of education (briefly touching on the impact of the pandemic as well) with Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, which is free for students and educators. The Q&A was recorded in August 2020 and originally appeared as a video in their "Back to School?" interview series; it was actually inspired by the question of taking a gap year and questions about whether or not to go back to school this year that came up in their Virtual Campus community of students from across the world. image: Lyndsy Rommel / Flickr

Figma was founded in 2012 with a mission to connect designers virtually, enabling collaboration and communication no matter where they were in the world. Fast forward to 2020, and that original operational intent has paved the way for the company to expand significantly in the face of Covid-19’s impact on the working world. Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field sat down with Greylock general partner Sarah Guo to discuss how the company has evolved to meet a surge in demand, adapted to going fully remote, and how he is approaching leadership during this time of great upheaval. This episode is part of the #WorkFromAnywhere podcast series hosted by Sarah and Greylock partner David Thacker.

Dylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma, a design and prototyping platform for teams who build products together. With the support of the Thiel Fellowship, Dylan dropped out of Brown University to start Figma with his TA Evan Wallace (who became Figma’s CTO). They built Figma on the web in the hopes of tearing down the walls around the siloed design process. Dylan champions open, accessible design and believes such tooling must evolve for a cloud-based, collaborative world. The 8-year-old company has raised over $130 million to date with Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Index - and the most recent investors being Andreessen Horowitz who contributed to the $50m Series D-round closed at the end of April in the middle of Covid.Topics00:00 – Intro02:28 – Dylan’s background and experiences before Figma (internships at Flipboard, Microsoft and LinkedIn, computer science and math at Brown) 03:40 – Beginnings of Figma, Thiel Fellowship 05:14 – WebGL 05:55 – Figma’s premise and early development: “making design accessible to everyone” 09:00 – What technologies are changing the world vs. what technologies are we interested in 09:49 – Opportunities vs. meaning in business 13:15 – Trends on Figma during COVID, new use cases 17:15 – Fundraising for the first time (seed round with Index Ventures) 21:52 – Most recent fundraising (series D with Andreessen) during COVID 22:17 – Series D vs. earlier stage 23:27 – Remote fundraising vs. “regular” fundraising 26:35 – Thoughts on remote work and Silicon Valley 29:24 – Figma offices around the world 29:41 – The importance of learning about the basics of management as a first-time CEO 31:07 – Mentorship 32:40 – Personal note: “Your team is there for you, just like you’re there for them. It’s important to be vulnerable as a leader. It’s important to share your struggles. Because people are looking to help and you’re all together.” 33:00 – Conclusion See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The post E1040: Figma CEO & Co-Founder Dylan Field shares insights on crucial moments in Figma’s creation, overcoming SaaS burnout, active vs. passive user-pricing, getting Greylock & Sequoia to invest after they initially passed & more! appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post E1040: Figma CEO & Co-Founder Dylan Field shares insights on crucial moments in Figma’s creation, overcoming SaaS burnout, active vs. passive user-pricing, getting Greylock & Sequoia to invest after they initially passed & more! appeared first on This Week In Startups.

0:52 Jason intros Greylock's Sarah Guo 3:37 How did Sarah wind up at Greylock? 5:45 Sarah explains Greylock's "Zero to One" thesis & typical term commitment of a VC 11:53 How does Sarah measure her personal performance and her portfolio's performance? What are her biggest strengths as an investor? 16:12 How does she sharpen her decision-making skills? 17:53 Ranking her investment criteria: People, Markets & Product 20:26 Balancing intensity & life outside of work, the commitment of early-stage startups 27:26 Work-life balance & how the venture landscape changed over time 35:36 Greylock's structured & what was Sarah's first investment & how did it play into her investment thesis? 43:38 Sarah's investments in work-enabling software 48:00 Sarah recommends Dylan Field of Figma join the show - episode dropping Friday! 49:22 Identifying subtle flashes of brilliance in early products 58:28 Female founders being held to a higher standard 1:02:35 Anti-portfolio: Zoom 1:10:06 Sarah turns off her virtual background and reveals her location

Dribbble's very own Director of Design Noah Stokes chats with Figma co-founder Dylan Field on all things design process and collaboration. Learn more about Figma’s mission to give everyone—including non-traditional designers—the power to communicate and collaborate visually using tools that are highly intuitive. Don’t miss Dylan and Noah talk about using Figma to build design systems, some exciting new software features, and much more! This episode is brought to you by .ME. Make it easy for your clients to recognize your awesomeness by featuring your best work in one place—a place you own and control. Start building your online home with .ME, the most personal Internet domain. ###Links mentioned in overtime Dylan Field Dylan Field on Twitter Figma Figma on Dribbble Evan Wallace Full transcript available on dribbble.com/overtime.

Dribbble's very own Director of Design Noah Stokes chats with Figma co-founder Dylan Field on all things design process and collaboration. Learn more about Figma’s mission to give everyone—including non-traditional designers—the power to communicate and collaborate visually using tools that are highly intuitive. Don’t miss Dylan and Noah talk about using Figma to build design systems, some exciting new software features, and much more! This episode is brought to you by .ME. Make it easy for your clients to recognize your awesomeness by featuring your best work in one place—a place you own and control. Start building your online home with .ME, the most personal Internet domain. ###Links mentioned in overtime Dylan Field Dylan Field on Twitter Figma Figma on Dribbble Evan Wallace Full transcript available on dribbble.com/overtime.

Dylan Field is the Founder & CEO @ Figma, the startup that provides a better way to design, prototype and collaborate, all in the browser. To date, Dylan has raised over $82m in funding from some of the world's best investors including Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Index Ventures and more. Prior to changing the world of design with Figma, Dylan held roles at Flipboard, Microsoft and LinkedIn and was part of the renowned Thiel Fellowship. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Dylan made his way from Thiel fellow to changing the world of design and prototyping with Figma? 2.) What is the story behind the 4-year journey to the launch of their first product? How did Dylan maintain morale with such an extended window between creation and launch? What are the core challenges of building tools companies and getting initial traction? How did Dylan satiate VCs desire for fast growth with such a long period to launch? Is it possible to "go slow to go fast" with VC dollars? 3.) Sequoia led Figma's Series C, how did the round come together? What was it that made Dylan choose the lead investors for each of his rounds? How did this round compare to prior rounds led by Index, Kleiner and Greylock? How does Dylan advise founders to build relationships of trust and transparency with their VC in short period of time? 4.) How did Dylan approach the topic of board construction? What did he most want to get out of his board? What have been some of Dylan's biggest learnings when it comes to board management? What has Dylan found the most challenging element? 5.) As a young founder himself, where does Dylan see commonalities in the mistakes that other young founders make today? As a young founder, how has Dylan been able to hire A** talent execs? What have been some of the biggest learnings on team assembly and construction through the process? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Dylan’s Fave Book: Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Dylan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

How Do We Move The Rectangle: It’s no secret that we think design is integral to engineering great products. This week Gina Trapani and Skyler Balbus are joined by Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, to talk about how Figma’s collaborative interface design tool came to be. We talk about how diverse creative backgrounds are essential to building design teams, how browser-based tools leave designers at the mercy of the browser, and the ways in which constraint inspires creativity and partnerships. Dylan also shares a tip for new designers: get into open-source projects. LINKS Figma Adobe Fireworks (RIP) Aviary WebGL Hacker News Made by Evan Screenflow Loom Notion Repl Airtable

2012 Thiel Fellow and Figma cofounder Dylan Field joins Michael to discuss how to find a cofounder, dropping out, and how to make the first important hires in a company.

IT'S THE 2018 MILFy AWARDS!!! For the 105th episode of the MILFcast, I am joined by my co-host Heather Baxendale as say "DAMN THE ACADEMY AND HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS!!!" We have gathered together with friends/guests Dylan Field, Mark McDowell, and George Bell to give away the only award that truly matter: THE MILFY! Join us as we blast the last year of Hollywood in this very special episode! NOTE: This is a show we only do once a year so if you've never listened to M,I.L.F. before, I suggest listening to one of our previous episodes to get an idea of how bad we really are before listening to this audio catastrophe. We're typically marginally better at podcasting. Don't forget to listen to the very end for some of the ridiculous outtakes that didn't make it into the show. You can follow Kai & Heather on Twitter: @kaiderman @heather_kenobi Make sure and follow the show on Instagram: @milfcast You can also "like" the MILFcast (aka: the Man, I Love Films podcast) page on Facebook. Follow all our guests online. Plugs are shared at the end of the show. You can subscribe or download MILFcast for free on iTunes. If you like the show, please leave us some feedback on iTunes. Please drop a comment, request an older episode or leave any feedback on the episode at: kai@manilovefilms.com Music for the podcast provided by our buddy Steve Bush. To get some sweet sounds of your own, check out Steve at www.positronmusic.com This message will self-destruct..

Demand for designers is higher than ever. Great products — the outcome of thoughtful design — are a result of stellar user experience. As design becomes a higher priority for startups, we are seeing a fundamental shift in how designers work. In this episode of Greymatter, John Lilly of Greylock catches up with Figma CEO and co-founder Dylan Field to talk about how he got started as a entrepreneur, the Figma product, and the shift they’re seeing in the design space.

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Figma, measuring success, and meta debugging.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Dylan Field, founder of Figma and former Thiel Fellow. We talk about the problem Figma aims to solve for designers and how they’re measuring success. Field also talks about how they debugged Figma in its early days: by mandating their own designers use it to design the tool.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The beginnings of Figma Designers are increasingly at the center of their organizations. They're not just working alone in a corner; they're actually working collaboratively with other designers, they're working with engineers, they're working with product management, with executives. They're extremely connected inside the organization, but their tools, in contrast, are still offline and disconnected. We decided we wanted to build the first online collaborative tool for interface design. Design at Figma We're 17 people now, which is awesome. It's a really cool size because you walk in the office and there's that buzz. In terms of our engineering and design, we have eight engineers and we have four designers right now. It's a one-to-two ratio. That said, two of those engineers are more back-end server side, so it ends up probably being a one-to-one ratio in terms of when you're working on a project; a lot of times, engineers are in one project and designers are in multiple projects. We design everything in Figma. It's something you have to get used as you work at Figma and start designing things because you're inside the tool designing the tool, which is always interesting. That actually was a problem for a while when we were first starting off, before our software was at the quality bar it is now. It had a lot of bugs. This was maybe two years ago. We gave it to our designers and we mandated that everyone at Figma use Figma for design now. Right now, we're supporting a class at Berkeley. It's a 220-person class for UI design, and it's been amazing to see students coming from pretty beginner backgrounds. They're learning a ton, and they're using Figma to do it. I just hope that we can do more of that as the company grows. How Figma measures success We can't just measure success by looking at the number of users that we have. Rather, it's about the people who are using Figma. The real interesting question for us is, "Are they deeply engaging with it? Is this their tool of choice? Are they using it for the things that we think they're using it for? Is our value proposition that we think is really important, is that being shown to be important by our customer base?" So far, it seems to be. That's our initial impression. Really, it's about this depth of interaction. When we look at the data ... I wouldn't say average is a good way to look at it. For example, when you look a the distribution of how people use it, some people log in once and they don't log in again. That's just your standard Internet company. Everyone has that. Obviously, you try to reduce the number of people who do that. For the people who do use us, we're seeing them in it all day long. I guess the next level question is more qualitative, which is, "If you're a designer and you're using us for your work, are we making you more efficient? Are we making it easier for you to work with other people in the company? Are we making your job easier?" For non-designers, going back to the issue of communication, "Are we teaching you how to visually communicate? Are we teaching you how to work with designers better? Are we teaching you how to contribute to the design process?" If we can do that, I think that's a huge win.

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Figma, measuring success, and meta debugging.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Dylan Field, founder of Figma and former Thiel Fellow. We talk about the problem Figma aims to solve for designers and how they’re measuring success. Field also talks about how they debugged Figma in its early days: by mandating their own designers use it to design the tool.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The beginnings of Figma Designers are increasingly at the center of their organizations. They're not just working alone in a corner; they're actually working collaboratively with other designers, they're working with engineers, they're working with product management, with executives. They're extremely connected inside the organization, but their tools, in contrast, are still offline and disconnected. We decided we wanted to build the first online collaborative tool for interface design. Design at Figma We're 17 people now, which is awesome. It's a really cool size because you walk in the office and there's that buzz. In terms of our engineering and design, we have eight engineers and we have four designers right now. It's a one-to-two ratio. That said, two of those engineers are more back-end server side, so it ends up probably being a one-to-one ratio in terms of when you're working on a project; a lot of times, engineers are in one project and designers are in multiple projects. We design everything in Figma. It's something you have to get used as you work at Figma and start designing things because you're inside the tool designing the tool, which is always interesting. That actually was a problem for a while when we were first starting off, before our software was at the quality bar it is now. It had a lot of bugs. This was maybe two years ago. We gave it to our designers and we mandated that everyone at Figma use Figma for design now. Right now, we're supporting a class at Berkeley. It's a 220-person class for UI design, and it's been amazing to see students coming from pretty beginner backgrounds. They're learning a ton, and they're using Figma to do it. I just hope that we can do more of that as the company grows. How Figma measures success We can't just measure success by looking at the number of users that we have. Rather, it's about the people who are using Figma. The real interesting question for us is, "Are they deeply engaging with it? Is this their tool of choice? Are they using it for the things that we think they're using it for? Is our value proposition that we think is really important, is that being shown to be important by our customer base?" So far, it seems to be. That's our initial impression. Really, it's about this depth of interaction. When we look at the data ... I wouldn't say average is a good way to look at it. For example, when you look a the distribution of how people use it, some people log in once and they don't log in again. That's just your standard Internet company. Everyone has that. Obviously, you try to reduce the number of people who do that. For the people who do use us, we're seeing them in it all day long. I guess the next level question is more qualitative, which is, "If you're a designer and you're using us for your work, are we making you more efficient? Are we making it easier for you to work with other people in the company? Are we making your job easier?" For non-designers, going back to the issue of communication, "Are we teaching you how to visually communicate? Are we teaching you how to work with designers better? Are we teaching you how to contribute to the design process?" If we can do that, I think that's a huge win.

Today we caught up with Dylan Field, the CEO and co-founder of Figma. In this episode we dig into Dylan's background, design tools an Figma, internships, opinionated design, design education and more.