Thread by @weekinclubhouse

Special episode of Good Time coming up ft. @zoink (Founder/CEO of Figma) 🔥

Follow along here 👇

https://twitter.com/GoodTimeShowCH/status/1353506939636862976

.@pdavison: Clubhouse is currently 9 people. Our goal is to grow to 40. Hiring for engineering, recruiting, trust and safety, design, and pretty much everything.

.@pdavison: Clubhouse was far from our first app. We've been in the batting cage for 15 years hoping to hit a home run.

.@zoink: I met my co-founder (@evanwallace) in a CS class at Brown where he was my TA. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. We talked about starting a company and began looking at ways to use WebGL to build creative tools.

.@zoink: The @thielfellowship was great for 2 reasons:

1) Non-dilutive cash to give us runway to prototype more complex projects

2) The community pushed us to think bigger

.@zoink: When I was deciding whether to drop out of Brown University, it was a pretty easy decision from a learning perspective. I learned way more building with @evanwallace than spending more time at Brown.

.@zoink: The @thielfellowship is one of the most incredible communities I've been in. So far, 2 IPOs this year, 2 of the top 5 cryptocurrencies (Polkadot and Ethereum), and many other great companies built by alumni.

.@zoink: The "Why Now?" of @figmadesign was WebGL. But it still took us 9 months to figure that out.

.@zoink: My advice is not that everyone should drop out of college. But if you have an idea, an itch to build, and the resources to do it, then you should definitely strongly consider it.

.@zoink: The "contrarian" part about starting Figma was whether the market of interface designers was big enough. The consensus at the time was that Adobe had saturated the entire market. What changed is that design became more important and many more people interested in design.

.@zoink: The biggest challenge of our Series A (December 2014) was whether the size of the designer market was big enough. By the time of our Series B (2017), it was very obvious the market was large enough.

.@sriramk: I've followed @evanwallace's work for a bit. He is an iconic technical force of nature on par with the John Carmack's and Dave Cutler's of the world.

.@zoink: @evanwallace's nickname in middle school was Computer Jesus (CJ for short).

.@zoink: The main trend today in design is that everyone is involved with design in someway. Eventually having Figma on your resume will be like having Microsoft Word on your resume.

.@zoink: The initial versions of Figma didn't have a lot of workflow and collaboration features. Once we worked with our users to learn and build what they needed, that's when we started to see traction.

.@zoink: Before Covid, we had a very strong in-person culture. We then started writing an internal doc about remote work guidelines, which eventually led to our blog post about the future of work at Figma figma.com/blog/how-work-…

.@zoink: When electing to work at a Figma hub (instead of being fully remote), the expectation is to come in to the office 2 days every week. Importantly, it's the same 2 days at each hub for everybody so there's more opportunities for serendipity.

.@zoink: Today there are so many cool and diverse use cases for @figmadesign ranging from slide decks to building virtual cities.

@SlackHQ had an outage a few months ago, and they used Figma to chat.

.@zoink: There are also so many cool ideas from our community about using plugins to add things to Figma we could have never imagined. For example I've been really impressed with @jsngr's GPT-3 plugin.

.@zoink: As you learn more about financial history and the way hyperinflation can create economic ruin, the idea of a trustless currency becomes appealing.

I think Ethereum is super exciting, as well as NFT, which is where @figmadesign and crypto could potentially meet.

.@zoink: I've been fascinated by Dark Forest, which uses Ethereum, WebGL, zero-knowledge proofs, and lots of other cool tech. zkga.me

...and that's a wrap!

Sign up for our newsletter to get weekly Clubhouse highlights 🔑
weekinclubhouse.substack.com