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Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field shares what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in todays software-driven economy. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I should congratulate you because you had a blockbuster IPO this summer. The stock settled a bit, but you still got nearly a $30 billion valuation, which is double what Adobe tried to buy you for a couple of years ago. Going public with so much fanfare and attention and success, has that been fun? How much do you look at it as a distraction in some ways for you and your team versus, “Let’s ride this wave as long as it’ll go, this is great”? I’ve been really proud of the team. I think nothing’s really changed in terms of our focus. I think the day itself was not just a celebration of Figma, but a celebration of design and for design to go public in that way. I felt very honored to be able to be part of that day. Hanging from the walls at the New York Stock Exchange we had the words, “Design is everyone’s business.” There were some champagne toasts, some people who were singing karaoke that night. What’s your go-to karaoke song? After two weeks of roadshow, my voice was gone, so I was just trying to make conversation, not sing that night. But there were some epic performances for sure. I thought about you a lot and the whiplash you had to go through with the Adobe merger getting blocked. Im curious how the company’s different because of that experience. Are you different? Are your products different? There were strategic reasons you wanted to become part of Adobe initially. It’s interesting. The company that’s acquiring in this period between sign and close, they can’t direct activities, and that’s something I think people don’t really know. And so we had our road map going into the deal, and that was our road map during the deal. It didn’t change, and our foot I think, was on the gas throughout. And the more that we started to have to ask ourselves with just regulatory being what it was, whether or not that was a correct assessment, not a correct assessment, we’ll leave it to history to tell. But I think that throughout as we saw that regulatory risk was real, that gave us even more impetus to say, “Foot on the gas even more.” I was like, “Okay, if we’re part of Adobe, great, we’re going in strong. And if we’re not, we should definitely be keeping our foot on the gas.” It was hard. As you’re talking with regulators all over the world, that’s almost a full-time job in itself. And to do that while also keeping the company going at full speed and then some, the team was incredible through that period. In some ways was that part of the appeal for Adobe of having Figma? Like, you guys are future tools that they didn’t have in the future way of operating. Where they want to go is where you are, and to a certain extent, maybe where they are is some of the places you want to go. We still don’t really see Adobe as competitive. I think it’s the easy framing, maybe. A lot of the Adobe suite, I’m not rushing to go build any of that. We have so much to go cover this journey from my data product, and I think that the focus for us right now is on a lot of the AI stuff . . . opportunities to make it so that we can lower the floor, bring more people into the design process, but also raise the ceiling, make it [possible for] designers [to] do more. It’s easy to say those words. It’s a lot to execute on to actually make that really good and up to the standards of designers. Because ultimately all of us humans, we expect more from AI than we expect from a human. If you say, “Here’s a small prompt to change my spacing in a file,” Figma better get it right, otherwise people dismiss it out of hand. I’m not saying that we have to do the work of a world-class designer, because we won’t. There’s a need for designers to lead the charge, and AI will only get you so far. But the drudgery, how do we remove that from the design process? How do we get more access to more people, bring more people into the world of creating prototypes and software? Those are our big things to bite off. I’ve noticed that the word design and the definition of what a designer is are often misunderstood by people in the business community, often by investors in the Wall Street community. People think, Oh, designer, they’re deciding what color the curtains are going to be or something like that. And I’ve had these conversations before with Mark Parker when he was the CEO of Nike who was a designer, Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Designer CEOs are still a small club. What do people not understand about design? What makes a designer CEO different? There are a million definitions of design, but I always like to think of it as a kind of core problem-solving, and I think that people go on this design journey and maybe the first step is like, does that even matter? I made something cool. Why do I need a designer? And then I think at some point people go, “Well, I should at least make it pretty. I’ll hire a designer. How do I make it pop? How do I make it cool, sexy?” And then I think from there people go, “Wait a second, maybe that’s not enough because I’m putting this in front of peoplemy product, my software, my appand they don’t know how to use it. They’re getting stuck.” And I think then from there they kind of think about, Okay, well, what’s the overall system? How do I think through how this entire thing should work? What’s the brand? What’s my point of view as a business? What are the business constraints? What’s the culture right now? How does that affect everything? It’s like you can go out in these outer rings and just keep going. And I think that designers have for a long time had a mentality of almost like this imposter syndrome. If you think about the way that design has evolved as a career, there were almost no designers in the 1990s, early 2000s, very few in number. They were oftentimes misunderstood, and yet they did incredible work despite it. Then we got into the Apple era of design is how it works, and Steve Jobs really championing design. Yo started to see this rapid growth in the number of designers being hired. When we started Figma, we didn’t know if Figma design was a big enough market because the Bureau of Labor said that there were 250,000 designers or something like that in the United States. And the reality was that there’s this total exponential trend of how many designers were being hired and how design-to-engineer ratios were changing. Through that growth, there were new challenges that were introduced. How do I keep everything consistent when all these different design voices have all sorts of creative ideas they want to explore? And also, how do I be efficient on a team with many designers around the table? How do I bring my voice as a designer to the highest levels? How do I have a seat at the table? And that was the meme then. Well, now design has a seat at the table in the era of today. I think people recognize the importance of design. They might not always understand it, but everyone’s trying to understand it. So now I think it’s like how do we lead? How does design bring people along and how do more designers step into roles where they can guide their organizations? Because the design process of thinking through different ways things can work, diverging, and then being able to converge on a solution and deliver it to customers and iterate, that is the business process that you go through for everything, and that’s what everyone needs to be thinking through as they adapt in this new age of software that we’re in.
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E-Commerce
Mita Mallick shares five key insights from her new book, The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses. Mallick is a corporate changemaker who, with an extensive career as a marketing and human resources executive, has advised Fortune 500 companies and startups alike. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice and was named to the 2025 Thinkers50 Radar list. She is a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Adweek, and Entrepreneur. Whats the big idea? The silver lining that comes from working for several bad bosses? You can learn what not to do as a leader. From every bad boss comes a valuable lesson about how to manage teams and contribute to a companys success. 1. Stop normalizing emailing at midnight. I was so excited to meet my new boss. Apparently, the feeling wasnt mutual. This was a former boss I nicknamed the Devil. She was the boss who never had any time for me during the day, but did have time to consistently send me emails between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. I started responding to her emails in the early morning hours. I was so desperate to impress her. I would wait to bump into her at the office, trying to get a smile, a wave, hello, thank you, or anything to make me feel like she saw me and I was appreciated. I was like a golden retriever pacing around the Devils office. I even tried to chase her out of the building one evening, but she was too quick for me. Years later, the question I continue to ponder is, Why didnt she have time for me? One of the biggest complaints we hear when it comes to relationships is You never have time for me. As a leader, if you cant make time for your teams during the day to coach, guide, and teach them, you have to ask yourself, Why are you leading in the first place? I challenge everyone to treat calendars like decluttering a wardrobe: Focus on high-value meetings, remove meetings that are no longer needed, and delegate meetings to others. Find time to connect with your teams during the day. Lets stop normalizing emailing at midnight. Im not ashamed to say that on most evenings Im asleep at midnight. It doesnt mean there arent periods of my life when Im working incredibly hard and constantly burning the midnight oil, but that isnt sustainable. The foundation of good leadership is taking care of yourself by getting enough sleep, eating well, and exercising so that you can be in service to others and fend off bad boss behaviors. 2. Silence can fuel bullies. My full name is Madhumita Mallick. For most of my life, my name has evoked a swirl of emotions for me, including anxiety and joy. I started going by just Mita and stopped bothering trying to teach people how to say my full name. When I graduated from business school and rejoined corporate America, I attempted to reclaim my full name. I was used to having my name mispronounced, misspelled, or mistaken as the name of the only other brown woman on my team. I wanted to reclaim my name as a source of pride. My former boss, who I nicknamed the Sheriff, was popular and a bully. When it came to my name, the Sheriff decided to completely rename me because he didnt want to learn how to pronounce it. He called me Muhammad because he could and wanted to. Im embarrassed to admit that for many weeks, I responded to a name that was not my own. Years later, I still wonder why no one around us ever said anything. Microaggressions like the one I experienced repeatedly can become a manifestation of bullying. They deplete our energy, chip away at our confidence, and make us question our contributions. Our collective silence can fuel those bullies. The burden shouldnt be placed on the target to speak out and stop this behavior. If you see someone being targeted in the workplace, intervene. First, you can give the bully a dose of their own medicine. In my case, someone could have said to the Sheriff, Oh, I just thought of the best name for you. Do you want to hear it? You can use this approach to be a mirror that shows them how they are behaving. Humor can also distract and deflect attention away from the person being targeted. Second, you can address them directly. You can let them know, calmly and firmly, that this behavior is not okay. They might say, Oh, its just a joke. In return, you can emphasize that it isnt funny. This reinforces that you wont allow them to discredit your response and reaction. Third, plan to intervene later. Power dynamics at work can impact our ability to speak up in the moment. We can be afraid of retaliation during or after an incident. Check in with the person being targeted. Help them document what has been happening and find someone else you trust to help with a plan of action. We spend too much time at work not to look out for each other. 3. Find the courage to help people move on. A former boss I called the Napper literally slept on the job. He dozed off in meetingslarge or small. I presented our annual brand plan while watching him nap. I saw him doze off dozens of times during our quarterly town hall meetings. Once, he closed his eyes for several minutes at our VPs monthly meeting, and she angrily shouted his name, then asked him a question. He was startled but not embarrassed. He mumbled a response that had nothing to do with the question and then started looking at his phone. The Napper came and went as he pleased, gossiped loudly, and enlisted others to talk about how much it sucked to work here. He even started interviewing for jobs in the cubicle next to mine, for all to hear. Years later, I still wonder why my former boss was allowed to repeatedly nap and be disengaged at work without any consequences. Disengagement can spread. It can become contagious, erode trust on the team, and negatively affect productivity. More of us need to intervene when we witness disengagement. Start by becoming a mirror. Take your team member to lunch or coffee. Remind them of their behavior. Focus on the facts and not your feelings. Next, allow space for the individual to reveal whats going on. You may or may not agree with what is shared, and you dont have to respond to everything. You can ask open-ended follow-up questions or simply thank them for sharing, letting them know that youre processing the information and will get back to them. Finally, ask them what must change. Professor Michael Murphy of Harvard University offers this powerful question for us to ask: What could change at work for you to be excited again about working here? You likely wont be able to change what they have revealed about the past, which may have led to their disengagement. But you can offer to help them move forward if they choose to recommit to their jobs. As leaders, we must have the courage to stop this downward spiral and help people move on to what theyre meant to do next. 4. Fear is a short-term motivator that leads to burnout in the long run. No one in my life had ever screamed at menot my parents, my brother, my husband, or my friendsuntil I worked for Medusa. Medusa ruled with fear. You could hear her from her office, down the hall, across the loor, and sometimes through the elevators as you were coming up. She would tell us, to our faces, that we were stupid. She would scream, curse, and aggressively point her fingers at people during meetings. I had never heard a boss drop so many F-bombs. She even hurled one of her Chanel shoes at my colleague, though thankfully it missed her head. I watched people run into conference rooms, slide down in their chairs, or wait around corners to hide from her wrath. Leaders like Medusa drive strong results in the short term. Many of us will show up to work scared. According to one study, more than a third of leaders at U.S. companies lead through fear. Nearly 40% of fear-based leaders said they strongly believe that stress can be positively harnessed, and yet these fear-based leaders made two other observations: 90% witnessed declines in productivity, and 60% acknowledged their workers arent happy. Creating workplace cultures based on fear costs the economy approximately $36 billion each year in lost productivity. Showing up scared to work every day is exhausting. Fear kills communication, isolates team members, inhibits creativity and innovation, and leads to burnout. Creating a culture where everyone is treated with respect shouldnt be a luxury. Workers dont want another free meditation app, an endless supply of fancy snacks, happy hours, and definitely not another oversize hoodie. They want to be respected and valued. 5. Unwavering loyalty no longer exists in the workplace. One former boss, nicknamed Tony Soprano, expected loyalty at all costs. With one swift phone call, he could kill someones career. Tony found out someone on our team was interviewing externally. By that same afternoon, this team members role had been eliminated, he was escorted out by security, and that external offer had vanished because Tony got a hold of the hiring manager at the other company. Tony told me I was going to do a one-year assignment on his team and Id be promoted at the end of that assignment. When the year mark was approaching, I started networking within the organization to figure out what I wanted to do next. When he found this out, he told me the assignment would actually last two to four years because I had not even begun to make an impact in this role. He told me that he decides when I can leave. Leaders like Tony believe they own our careers. They decide and dictate who gets to leave their team, when, and why. If you challenge their authority, they have serious doubts about your commitment to them and to the company. To them, your paycheck is the price in exchange for your loyalty, no questions asked. But unwavering loyalty no longer exists in our workplaces. Long gone are the days of pensions, guaranteed job security, and receiving a shiny gold Rolex after 30 years of service. The corporate social contract that employers once provided is now broken. We can no longer expect loyalty from our employees at all costs. We must redefine what loyalty looks like in our workplaces. As leaders, we must stop hoarding and holding on to talent. We must be honest and up front about career opportunities. We must communicate often and clearly about the changing needs and health of the business. Finally, when an employee wants to pursue a different opportunity, we let them go. We dont throw a tantrum when they resign. We wish them well and hope to get to work with them again someday. Loyalty isnt guaranteed, and it certainly is not built overnight. We cant demand loyalty from our employees. Good leaders understand that loyalty must be earned over time. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
A CEOs canoodling with his companys human resources chiefcaught on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concertmade global headlines this summer. Beyond the memes and tabloid fodder, personal lives were shattered and a company was left in turmoil after its leaders sudden exit. The case, involving the AI firm Astronomer, may be the most visible of recent CEO personal scandalsthink sex affairs, drug abuse, or embarrassing behaviorbut its not an isolated incident. Just weeks following the Coldplay kiss cam incident, the CEO of Nestlé was shown the door for similar behavior involving a relationship with a subordinate. Personal scandals have been the top cause of CEO terminations in recent years. How do these scandals stack up to other corporate indiscretions, such as financial fraud? As a management professor, I knew that theres lots of research on CEOs financial crimes, but surprisingly little on personal misdeeds. So my colleagues and I examined nearly 400 CEO scandals involving either financial or personal misconduct. In this research, published in August 2025 in the journal Strategic Organization, we found that not all CEO scandals are treated equally: The type makes all the difference. Personal scandals are harder to survive For most people, personal indiscretionssuch as having an extramarital affair or abusing drugsare a private matter. But for CEOs, even scandals unrelated to business create doubt about their judgment, integrity, and leadership. The result is usually career-ending for the CEO, research shows, and can create lasting harm for the company. We found that CEOs overwhelmingly exit in the wake of personal scandalsfive times as often as CEOs who commit financial misconduct do, in fact. And strong business performance doesnt tend to offer protection. For example, Hewlett-Packards Mark Hurd, whos widely credited with turning around HP in the mid-2000s, was ousted following a very visible personal misconduct scandal 15 years ago. The fallout was swift: The companys stock fell nearly 10% immediately after the announcement, and with leadership in a tailspin, it dropped more than 40% within a year. Why bad numbers come with better odds Companies are also routinely accused of cooking the books. In recent months, several firms have been forced to restate their earnings after their financial statements did not add up. These scandals shake investor trust, trigger sharp drops in company stock, and often lead to the chief financial officers departurewith some CEOs following suit. However, while cooking the books is considered a severe form of corporate misconduct, our research suggests that it has fewer job-ending repercussions for CEOs than personal scandals do. Roughly half of all CEOs implicated in financial scandals survive, we foundbecause, unlike in personal scandals, CEOs can often shift blame. We also found that CEOs dismissed due to financial scandals tend to be replaced with outside candidates, which has been shown to stabilize a companys stock price and lead to stronger long-term performance. It might be surprising to learn that a CEOs personal misconduct can come at a greater costboth to the business and the executivethan outright financial fraud. Is corporate America overestimating the importance of CEOs private behavior? Or is it underestimating the importance of cooking the books? While I dont have answers to these questions, I think our findings show the need for more discussionand more research. Michael Nalick is an assistant professor of management at the University of Denver. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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