Figma: Dylan Field

And they were just going, Dylan, you gotta be more commercial. I'm like, What does that mean? And they're like, You gotta be more commercial Uh and I'm like do you mean do I have to like say more sales terminology and stuff like that? Like like what are you getting at? What they meant was price the product. And um When this design leader came and said, We can't use it unless you price the product, I was like, Oh, everyone, we gotta go charge for the product. As fast as we can. So I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. Built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Dylan Field left college to figure out a better way for designers to collaborate. built a company called Figma.

Now we're Billions. If you've ever booked a trip on Airbnb, watched something on Netflix, or joined a Zoom call, you've interacted with a product that was designed using Figma. Figma is the platform behind the platforms, a tool that lets teams of designers collaborate in real time from anywhere in the world. And while that might sound obvious today, back in 2012, it was a pretty radical idea. At the time, real-time design collaboration was clunky and slow. Most people still emailed files back and forth. Even designers were skeptical that something like Figma could work.

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