Claire Butler: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You've been on my wishlist of guests for a long time, and so I'm really excited to be finally chatting. You were the 10th employee at Figma, which is now worth tens of billions of dollars depending on which valuation you look at, and probably thousands of employees. I don't even know, but many, many. And you joined before the product even launched. And so, I have a million questions I want to ask about how Figma grew and all the things that went into it. I'm curious what it was like to be early days at Figma. Is there a memory that comes to mind that's zany, funny, fun, tangible of just what it was like to work at Figma in the early days? Yeah, totally. No, that's a good question. We were right downtown on New Montgomery and Minna, and I think the thing that sticks out to me is actually two competing stories that talk about just how much at that time you'd oscillate between these really high-level strategic decisions and then total current work. So my first day at Figma, I come into the office and we're going through some stuff. There's like 10 of us in the office, we're chatting, and I look at some of the plans, some of the things they're working on, and I see that they were actually had some branding and positioning and things that the products, Figma, was going to be named Summit, that was the name. So the company was going to be Figma, and then the product suite, the product design tool was going to be Summit with the idea that eventually we'll have other tools and that could be like mountaintop or I don't know what the rule, they had a whole thing around the different things that could be for the future product set. And I remember my first day, I had an immediate reaction of like, " We cannot make this thing Summit. That's not going to work. We can't have two brands. Summit's not ownable, we can't build equity and multiple things. That's just never going to work. We kind of have to just stick with one." And I think Figma is ownable and makes sense and we should just go with Figma. So we kind of should probably kill the Summit thing. And Dylan said to me, he was like, "Oh, that's interesting. How about you make a presentation and present it to everyone tomorrow?" And so I did that. I was like, "Oh, okay, I guess this is what I'm doing the rest of the day." So I went and made a little presentation about how we couldn't build all this equity in two places and all of the things, and then the next day we decided to kill that name. And so we went with Figma for the name of the product instead of Summit. And that's how fast things moved, right? And how much you just ran with it and how to ownership. I compare that to the first meetup we had, which was probably just 10 people in the office, honestly. But I remember I was in charge of that, so I had to get all the food and everything there, and I just Instacarted some things and ordered some pizza, but I'd forgotten ice. And so I had to go walk down to the nearest corner store, which was three blocks away or something, and get ice. And I got four bags. And I remember I was walking down the street down probably third street with three bags of ice and it was really heavy. And I remember thinking, "This is so hard. This is so heavy. I can't carry all this ice." And it's just like that's... I did that too probably the next week. And so, I think it was just this oscillation between like, "Oh, we're making these high level strategic decisions and someone else has to go by the ice." So that's what it was like at Figma in the early days. That's incredible. That's almost a metaphor. Someone's got to go carry the ice.…

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