YouSaid · the spoken record

Dylan Field

lines on the record: 98
first: 2025-06-16
most recent: 2025-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, people were clearly not happy. They felt like I needed help. Right. I actually did need help. I needed someone to help on the management side. We were not going to be able to scale fast enough without bringing someone else on to help run a part of the company. I just kind of felt offended though, I think, because I obviously poured my heart and soul into this. And yeah, I felt bad because at some point that me, I did raise my voice. I mean, just in response to one of the kindest guys on our team who was saying something that was actually quite constructive.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We validated that so we went out and found all these companies in Silicon Valley and San Francisco especially. And we talked with, you know, I don't know, must have been dozens of companies. We show them Figma. And just kind of like a flat response. They were not too interested. They're just kind of like, oh, cool”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Micromanaging is a good way to describe it, perhaps even a mild way. I think I had for quite a while thought about every aspect of the product experience we wanted to build. And I, you know, felt a lot of pressure to get something out there. And so I would just kind of come in and say, hey, this is the way we're going to do it. Turns out when you hire smart people, they have ideas too. And also turns out that sometimes those ideas are like really, really excellent. But I think the time urgency combined with like having thought about it a lot made me wan into, you know, we just got to do it this way. Let's go. And that was not a fun environment to be in, I think.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And moved to San Francisco. And, you know, also I was. Definitely going through a hard time personally. You know, my dad had been diagnosed with cancer. And I certainly was not an experienced manager. I was still kind of getting the mechanics right around how do you just set goals and motivate people. And we still haven't shipped anything. And now people are kind of looking at the clock and going, is this ever going to ship? Is this just like endless?”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we had a very clear product roadmap and we All felt that there was something here. I could have done a better job of helping people see it through conversations with customers and whatnot. I was having those conversations. You know, I'd kind of come back, share all my notes. What I found is that if employees are not talking with these or directly, they just don't see it the same way. And they don't understand the pain that people have unless they can actually interact with folks and hear about it firsthand. And I think there's plenty of things I get on the manager's side to be better. But I think it was. It didn't really like blow up per se until a little later.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was totally unrealistic. I'd have to check the deck, but I think we probably expected it to be a year or so, maybe a year and a half. But yeah, we thought it would be a pretty straight shot. It was not, it took a while.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, John is just an excellent human. And immediately I was just so impressed. Like, not only was he super high integrity, it was just very clear and principled, but he was also... His belief, his care about design. It was off the charts and then said, hey, I'm down to keep in touch. I like you guys. Let's just keep talking. You know, at some point, maybe a year and a half or so later, John said, you know, if you're ever thinking about raising another round, let me know.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was one guy you really wanted to be involved with this, and this was a guy named John Lilly, who was been the CEO of Mozilla and was now partner Greylock. And I imagine you wanted him involved because of his experience with Mozilla, running a browser business. But he did not, he decided he was not going to invest at the seed level. He didn't feel like you guys really knew what you were going to do. And normally, not normally, oftentimes people just move on. And they're like, okay, he doesn't want to do it. But you were really You wanted him involved, right? And I guess you felt like you had to figure out a way to get him to convince him that this was going to be something. Tell me a little bit about that relationship.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yet, honestly, I've looked back at that pitch and I don't know if I would invest in myself if I saw it back in 2013. It was very vague. It was not clear yet what we were going to do exactly and exactly the strategy was. I think that came very shortly afterwards. But we raised just a bit ahead of being concrete on our direction.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very focused on what are the things that we can just do so much better from the tool standpoint, not the collaborative standpoint, but as an individual user, what are the breakthroughs we can introduce? Can we make a better way to create grids and guides? Also, how do we honestly build a project of this magnitude on the web? That was something that we had a lot of technical work to do to figure out what was possible.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so both I had been working as a designer at Flipboard or design intern, I went and talked with other designers that I knew. I also started talking and researching and learning about how companies were growing their design teams. And there's something that was like seemed very off because these companies were investing a lot in design. You know, Facebook was acquiring entire design agencies to try to make their design team bigger. And it was like, wait, how is it the case that all this hiring is going on? And yet there's only a few hundred thousand web designers in the United States. Like, are the numbers wrong or it's growing so fast that it doesn't matter? And either way, we can go into other areas later. So I think let's go. Let's go do this. And at first,”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Evan and I both grew up using Google Docs, you know, playing multiplayer games. And so the nature of real-time collaboration, that was native to us. And just kind of like obviously the way that things should work. That said, we weren't sure about the market size for design. I looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it said there is something like 200,000 designers in the United States or web designers it is. And so that's obviously like a pretty small number. And at the same time, we felt like there's something there. We felt like maybe this is a starting point. We go broader afterwards into other areas. Let's try it out.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that that experience of working at Flipboard, working with the designers there, it's always been my mind as something that was amazing to be part of this design process. And Flipboard was way ahead of its time. And the collaboration didn't exist. It was emailing files or at best you put them in a Dropbox folder. But, you know.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This meme thing, you know, we're just used to it because it's internet culture and we see it online all the time and we share them with our friends. But like most people haven't discovered it yet. It's a very early part of an exponential trend around memes. Memes are going to be way bigger than we could ever possibly imagine. We should make a meme creator. And Evan's like, are you serious? And so he kind of humored me for a week or so, like five days. We made a meme generator. you know, it was a very good meme generator. And at the end of the week, we just kind of looked at each other and I'm like going, man, I dropped out of Brown for this. And Evan's going, I think I'm going to quit. And it was a good sign of like, we're going to work on some more serious stuff.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that first one, yes, I think we were also looking at more consumer cases that were not as meme-oriented as well at some point later on. We literally create a meme crater. That was the darkest week of Figma. You know, I was pitching Evan saying, look, I've done the research. I've looked at the data.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First thing we looked at was 2D face swapping. So basically I got your face, I got my face, how can I take your face and swap it onto my face? Kind of a cool party trick. But with something called Poisson blending, which Evan found a way to do very fast in real time in the browser with some graphics wizardry, we were able to make it so that we had an amazing demo in just like a week.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they probably were like, and today we're going to introduce you to Wiz Kid Genius, Dylan Field, welcome to today's show. And they were saying, and tell us, what are you going to do? How are you going to change the world?”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, we didn't start till August because Evan wanted to graduate, of course. Got started a bit later than when we received the fellowship. And the start coincided with media that the fellowship had kind of offered up. And so, you know, the actual first or second day of doing the fellowship, starting to work with Evan, I flew out to New York with my mom to be on the Today Show. And I had no idea what we're doing yet because we hadn't barely started.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was excited about the fellowship and also the other people that were taking the fellowship or applying were just so cool. And the chance just to have this community around people that literally knew what I was going through and spent time with them, it was just socially very helpful and also very inspiring. People would push you and say, hey, why are you thinking small? Think bigger. And that actually, I think, was a big input to why we got to where we eventually headed for FICMA.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My parents And Vave more excited now. My dad put it, he goes, I always thought you were weird, but these people are weird too”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so you guys are batting around ideas, and you really kind of land on this idea of using WebGL to create something that will sort of empower people to be designers somehow. You're not really sure what it's going to be. And then you become a finalist for this fellowship. You get to the final round, 40 people under 20. You get it, you're picked. You present, you sent to San Francisco, you fly to San Francisco, you present, your parents came and more excited now. They bought in.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really a ton of money. Middle class careers. And they had put a ton of resources into my education. So the idea of potentially squandering that is like, what are you doing? And with Ev We would talk every weekend, even as this process was ongoing, and just kind of keep moving forward, talking about ideas to prototype. And the thing we're exploring then was using WebGL, but it was, because again, that's the hammer and everything was a nail. So basically. Exploring how do you take a photograph and convert it into a 3D scene? And so we thought maybe there's a way to go and explore many different tools that will let people do the sort of things that you can accomplish in high-end programs such as Photoshop or 3D tools, but do them in a way that anyone can access and really democratize that”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's funny. I was really proud of that essay and I had a lot of fun writing it because I really don't like chocolate and people have always thought that was the weirdest thing ever. So I thought I was answering the question, the purest way possible, and maybe even being a bit medicontrarian.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to just read a little bit of it says Tell us what you think is true, but that most people think is not true. And you write chocolate is repulsive. And then you go into a whole essay about why you hate chocolate, you think it's horrible, you can't stand the smell of it, and then you include the fact that apparently 2% of the population doesn't like chocolate and that Nestle did research into this, and they found that maybe there's small then, but yeah. Maybe there's an imbalance of gut bacteria, because to most people, you're thinking chocolate is repulsive? It's insane. Who thinks that? Everybody knows chocolate is delicious. But this is truly a counterintuitive idea. And I have to think that that really caught their eye because all of a sudden it's just like a left turn, totally not connected to technology.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. Plenty of people take leave of absence. So I think that was my mindset, first of all. Even if the startup flames out, I learn a lot from Evan, had some savings from the acting days. And at the same time, I thought the probability of this happening was very low. Well, I get the Teal Fellowship, almost certainly not. Well, Evan decided to do this with me. Who knows? But it'll be fun to explore and put an application just in case.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to go back to what made you compelled you to apply to this fellowship in the fall of in 2011? I mean, because they want you to drop out of school, but why did you decide to do this when you were absolutely convinced that you were going to graduate from college”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, so one of the directions WebGL, which Evan was way ahead of RBL, and I was also a fan of too. I thought that there's so much you could do with it, but I also had some concerns. And the other one was drones. I look to the world in late 2011 and said, okay. Still need to figure out the use cases, but I'm pretty sure that quadcopters and sort of what will come out of that will be huge. I think we were both right.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of everything. So the question that we were trying to answer was why now? Like what is the change that's happening in the world that would make an idea interesting? You know, I had a huge list, you know, as did hean kind of merged them and then started striking them out. And at the end, we had two that we thought were kind of interesting. One was one that I was more bullish and excited about, one was something that he was more excited about. But we're both kind of interested in the other one too. And the two were drones and WebGL.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, Evan and I got dinner and we started talking about, okay, well, would you ever start a company with me? And he goes, yeah, I consider that might be more fun than joining a bigger company. And I always said, great. Well, let's meet up some more and see if there's any ideas we like.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Evan was my TA for a computer vision class at the time. I said, hey, do you want to get dinner? Got dinner, and I said, you know, you're about to graduate next semester. What are you going to do? And he goes, Well, I've got offers from you list all the places he had interned, Microsoft, Pixar. And he goes, you know, I just think that. I'll be probably not as challenged in those environments, but it could be cool. We'll see. And by the way, Evan's not like a super cocky guy. He is as humble as humble gets. Also, he was very clearly the most genius person I'd ever met. His nickname was CJ, Computer Jesus, because Evan was basically on the computer every chance he got. And it turns out if you spend 10, 12 hours a day programming from a young age, every single day, you are a really good programmer.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I thought to myself, okay, there's no way I'm going to go start something if I'm not doing it with someone that I think is amazing. And I thought, okay, the only person I'd start a company with, and whatever way it goes, I'll learn from them. And it'll be an amazing experience because just being with them will be Know a gift into itself is Evan Wallace.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I guess the next year you go back to Flipboard to work there again for a while, I think this time in design. And then in your third year, Brown, you decide to apply for the Teal Fellowship, which is this fellowship where the winner gets a couple hundred thousand dollars to basically drop out of college and start a business. So did you have an idea in your mind of what you might want to do or even who you might want to do it with?”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were in Palito, and it was a very buzzy company at the time. And it was just an absolutely gorgeous product. And yeah, I just started to get to hang out with the designers. And I'd always been really interested in design. One thing that I got to learn at Flipboard was just really more about the history of typography, of layout. And I'd always been surrounded by magazines growing up. My dad found some ways to get crazy discounts on magazines through some coupon codes online or something like that. And so there's always just like endless magazines around the house.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so Flipboard was one of the first iPad apps that really took advantage of the iPad surface to export what was possible.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you go back to Providence, Rhode Island and start your sophomore year. And really getting more into design, right? Because you had done a lot of You've been interested in web design, but you were a programmer, but you were getting more into design. And I guess the summer after your second year, you go work for this company called Flipboard, which I think they're still around. Yeah, they are. And they basically created this.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the real effort started after to develop it started after I left my internship. Jeff Wiener certainly came out to me after I resented about the project at all hands. And yeah, after the all hands, he goes, hey, so like, you know. Do you want to keep going with LinkedIn? And I said, well I think I want to go back to school. Thank you, though. And Tia started thinking about starting something someday. I said, maybe. I said, well, if you do, call me. At least it's my recollection. His recollection is slightly better, which is, or a better story. His recollection is saying, hey, Dylan, are you going to start something someday? Maybe, I don't know. Well, if you do all fund it, and I got to say, I like his version better, but I don't remember it quite that way.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you ended up working on this project called LinkedIn for Good, which basically aggregated all of the skills that were available on the site. I guess it even caught the attention of the CEO of Jeff Weiner.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So that was kind of the idea is there a nonprofit aspect that we can explore, etc. At the meantime, I saw a lecture. From someone who was talking about the work he had done. To translate text messages for victims of the Haiti earthquake. But the issue was they didn't have enough crayle speakers. So they couldn't translate to the emergency responders the text messages of people that were stuck in rubble. It was horrible. And I'm sitting there and going, my gosh, we've got. The data To know who the speakers of Krail are. And so it kind of spawned this idea of okay, maybe there's some way to connect people to nonprofits based on skills.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I met DJ Patel, who later on became the Chief Data Science Officer of America under the Obama administration. And DJ contacted me pretty early in my freshman year and said, hey, what are you doing this summer? It was pretty informal all the time. That was kind of the process. And DJ was great. The start of the internship, he said, hey, you know, Everyone at LinkedIn on this team, they all do something the first three months. They do something that's like really incredible and foundational. So you got to figure out that that is for you. And I was like, oh, okay. And, you know, it's in the back of my head. I'm kind of searching for that challenge as well. And there was an end day, which is kind of like a hack day. And I kind of noticed that people were really excited about this idea of LinkedIn for good.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I've always been curious about most everything. And at Brown, one of the best parts is there's no formal requirements for the school. Than technically a writing requirement, you need to make sure that you can write. And yeah, I kept getting pulled back into sort of Silicon Valley startups as something that I felt very engaged with”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he was really cool. Yeah, he... Was very cerebral, very into math and physics. And I think the reason you took the January job was very much to just kind of think about stuff all day long and be in his head. And so I try to always cultivate friendships with people who are older than me. I think now that I'm sometimes the older one, it's like, okay, you're a student at college. Like there's a lot I could probably learn from you, you know. He would tell me about different ideas and concepts that he was learning about and studying himself. And at some point, he said, well, look, the really cool stuff isn't proofs. You should really learn a little bit of set theory. And somebody was super sweet.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mom was an elementary school teacher, and so I would press her for while we're waiting for things. I'd press her for, hey, give me more problems to solve.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, first of all, I was very thankful that my parents, especially my mom, who was the one who was driving me all these places, was willing to do that. But also that she was never pushing me to do it. And I think at some point the combination of like becoming a teenager, acne, braces, awkwardness in general, plus game mortars in math computers. It's like, okay. And then, hey, math and computers is pretty fun. So I started diving in on that instead.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, Center was a junior college, but during their summer program, which is really cool, it's actually my most embarrassing moment in acting as a kid was during that production because I fell asleep on stage in that scene where in Peter Pan where all the kids are asleep and Wendy is talking to Peter. And the actress playing Peter Pan gave him my cue and I was still asleep and she gave me my cue again, still asleep and so she gave me a kick and then I leapt up and gave my line. But yeah, it was like Dylan didn't get up anyway. But due to that production, I had the experience with stunt flying. And then that was what they're looking for for the XP commercial. So it was kind of a fun chain of events that led to that one.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a funny one because there was a performance of Tommy the Who. That the original actor who was going to play Young Tommy fell through for because she refused to shave her head or cut her hair rather than needed someone else. And so I got pulled in.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At five, five and a half, whatever I was, like I could read, I could sit still, and I think in comparison to how I am now, I was actually a very, that was a cute kid. You know, that's to change to puberty. We can get to that later. But as a kid, you know, was cute. And so I guess someone referred me to an agent and no major roles or anything, but hotspot auditions and some commercial work, a little bit of TV work.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were just going, Dylan, you got to be more commercial. I'm like, what does that mean? They're like, you got to be more commercial. And I'm like, do you mean do I have to save more sales terminology and stuff like that? What are you getting at? And I think what they meant was price the product. And when this design leader came and said, we can't use it unless you price the product. I was like, oh, everyone, we got to go charge for the product as fast as we can. I was a little dense on it, but it got there eventually.”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2025-06-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Figma: Dylan Field · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT