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Hello and welcome everyone.

I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is founder, CEO, Guy Founders. Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way. And this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at Investor Field Guide dot com.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shannassy Asset Management, all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shannassy asset management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shannassy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

My guest today is Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Sigma, a collaborative online design tool which has taken the world by storm for the most recent valuation, more than two billion. And backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Greylock Sigma has become one of the most successful companies building tools for creators. In our conversation, we dive deep into the principles Enigma is built on. Describe how they created multiplayer for design tools and the growing importance of design in all businesses.

I hope you enjoy this great conversation with Dylan Field.

So, Don, I thought a fun place to begin this conversation would be with your application to the Teal Fellowship back in 2011. I had a lot of fun reading that application just earlier today. I saved it for this morning in preparation for our chat. My first question is what it felt like to apply. What was your impression of the fellowship and the emotional decision to apply to something very distinct and unique like that?

Well, take me back. It was 2011 when I applied. Looking back at that time, I talked with my now co-founder about potentially starting a company. And I thought maybe this has a one percent chance of going through. But if it does, I should probably think about this fellowship thing. It was sort of like a shot in the dark more than anything else, I think, at that point. There's definitely intention there. I was excited by the idea, but at the same time, I wasn't definite.

One hundred percent when I submitted the application about starting a company fast forwarding as I went to the fellowship interview process, because at that point it was multiple stages. I grew more and more convinced that I want to start a company, and in particular I wanted to do it with Evan, my co-founder, who I think is one of those brilliant and humble people in the world. I felt like I would learn so much from him if I went and started a company with him.

Edward and way more than any other context, I could put myself into what makes him so good.

Oh, man. I've asked myself that many times. I think that he has a natural ability to focus and to be curious and level up his skills. And if you do that, he started coding when I think he was in elementary school or middle school. So you got an early start. I think his middle school nickname was S.J for computer.

Jesus never let him down.

And I think that if you focus on that just 10 hours a day, continually advance your skills for decades. The compounding results are really incredible. He constantly pushes himself to learn new skills, and that means that he's the sort of bleeding edge of everything, often far ahead of the industry and his thinking.

What stands out the most about your memory of the Tiel interview process? The interview process that you mentioned is multiple rounds.

They reviewed your application and then you had a call with someone, their network. And I remember this call that I had. We really didn't talk much about my application. We were talking about like moral philosophy. And it just kind of went in all these different directions. And so I thought, OK, well, I have no idea if I did well in that one. I heard back a few weeks later and they said that they're interested in moving forward for an update.

And I said, well, the original idea we pitched you around drones, that's not happening anymore. We're very focused on creative tools and WGL now, but still figuring it out. And about a month later, they then invited me to a weekend where basically you met thirty nine other people because it was 20 spots. They basically got to 40 finalists. For those 40 finalists, you had to go up on stage and they're sort of like a almost like a science fair ask feeling afterwards where people would go around to your little table and they would stop by and ask you questions.

And it was such a blast because I got to meet all these people who were really lean into risk. There's your passion around these different ideas they want to pursue. They don't do it that way anymore. It was quite a production.

How do you feel now about our imperative to create more open sources of education for younger people, even down into high school? I love Jesus. That's so funny.

I feel like more and more you're the head of a creative tools company. I'm assuming you're going to be in support of this. But finding ways to expose young people, I think, which was the intention of the fellowship to open ended learning titre feedback loops versus this kind of closed education system that we still have. How have your thoughts changed or evolved on that idea as you've gotten older?

There's a lot back in that question. I think, first of all, the thing that people don't recognize as much as they should is how much the entire world economy is going digital at this point. I think it was maybe a decade ago now or almost a decade ago that Marc Andreessen wrote his famous software is eating the World Post. I think the most underreported story in Silicon Valley or potentially the any business press is how much that is true today and how it's even more true, more exponentially truer than it was in twenty eleven or whenever he wrote that post.

As entire world economy becomes more digital, I think it's so important to have more ability for people to break into that, because otherwise we're just increasing inequity and making sure that people don't have access to this huge opportunity. I think people around the world are seeing that and they're really eager to get into the design code just any way to develop software. For example, this morning I was walking to grab some coffee literally just as an hour and a half ago, and I had a sweatshirt on and on the back of the sweatshirt, said mentor Hackett Brown.

Not even a thing I thought about. I just had thrown the sweatshirt on on my way to grab. Coffee, because it's a little cold and this guy stopped me and he asked me, hey, do you have any resources to learn how to code? Because I had a sweatshirt on. I said, Montrachet Brown. Thing is, this is really a powerful moment for me because it was an example of what I see everyday on the Internet of people really trying to break into this industry and software person to come into Francisco from Mexico, moved here to learn more English, to learn more about tech and giving covid had a very hard time breaking in and he's working construction instead.

But this is something that so many people are trying to access. And I think it's a big responsibility of the tech industry to increase that access. And that goes for people internationally. It goes for people in middle school, high school. It goes across ages. I think just fantastic early education.

It was also very notable on your application that you refused to submit your SAT score because you felt it was at odds with two key pinnacles of the fellowship, which was lifelong learning and independent thought. I love that you've already mentioned your compounding impact of lifelong learning in your co-founder of the computer science side. What have you seen and learned about the importance of or types of independent thought across the journey of building Sigma?

To start a company in general, you have to really be able to think independently and you have to be able to find some opportunity in the world that no one else has pursued before or as pursued suboptimally. For example, for Sigma, one thing that we assumed early on was that people will want to work in the browser and we can make that a great experience. And that was something where everyone at the time thought we were a little bit crazy for, remember, early on and figments history trying to recruit people.

And I would tell them, hey, we made this thing and it works in the browser. No one would believe me. This got to the point where I would have these first means of candidates and I would show up. And the first thing I would do almost just right after I introduce myself is I would get my laptop out and open it just to show them that it works because otherwise they just thought I was insane without actually seen it live.

I think that similar to that was multiplayer the ability to edit simultaneously. That was something where people when we talk to them, only one or two designers would tell us, yes, we want the ability to edit simultaneously. We want multiplayer. We were very cautious around building it. But as we started to really look into how it felt without multiplayer, the medium just didn't work. If you're in the browser and someone else edits the thing that you're using, you really want to treat it like a space rather than a tool that you're using one to one, because otherwise your file is going to reload.

It's just a really suboptimal experience. And I think the browser really forces you to conceptualize tools as spaces. We went and we built it anyway, even though it was unclear if people needed it or wanted it. After we had built and gotten to the point where we had a prototype, we instantly realized that this was the right thing to do. But it was a bit of a leap of faith. And I think that you have to dare yourself to be able to think more independently.

Otherwise you only need to use local optimum instead of these global oltmanns.

I'm really fascinated by the earliest days of businesses like what Sigma has become because of their fragility and just the raw energy that could go a lot of different directions. Can you talk a bit about that very earliest stage of forming this business and what that was like? And I love things that went wrong as much as things that went right during this period. What did it feel like in the first year or so of the business?

We started in August 2012 and I'd say for the first 12 months it was very existential. I don't know. That's a feeling. But existential threat is now, I think, back to it time along with more exploration and creativity, which are, I guess, two sides of the same coin almost. But my co-founder and I would basically get up in the morning and we talk about things we wanted to try building. We build them and try to design them.

And I would try to validate them in research to different markets we could pursue. And it was this very iterative process where we explored different spaces. We could tackle just the rebuilding and we built a lot of cool stuff. But it was so essential because there's this constant question of are we building the right thing? It took us a long time before we got to what it is today. That was incredibly scary. I mean, I think the worst moment or the most dreadful moment perhaps was something that's Devon.

There's this big opportunity and means this is a sort of the fall 2012. And I actually think I was not wrong. There was an opportunity there. I was starting to see meme generation sites really taking off. They're all pretty bad. And we thought, OK, well, if we make a good one, then that's sort of a wedge we can have. And from there we can use more creative tools. So I think the thesis was right, but we spent a week building this thing ended up at the end of the week with a pretty nice generator.

And we both love each other and we're like, there's no way that we can launch this thing. We have no passion or interest and support. We look at myself in the mirror and I'm just like, why did I drop out of this? That was one of the lowest moments, I think, early on. But you kind of have to put yourself into this building mode and just explore. Otherwise you won't know what you do. My team yells at me for getting this far into interviews without actually asking you what exactly does and I need to do that now in a fun way to do this would be to talk about designers.

My guess is everyone engages with the work of designers constantly, all day, every day across their lives, but probably has never really thought about the process and the people behind all the things that they see. Can you just frame the market of designers? Who are these people? How many of them are there? How is their role evolved over time?

I think most people think of design as making things pretty. Or how do you make it look nice at the end of the process and how it's been historically. But what we've seen is actually that design has become more and more critical to the way people create software has actually evolved quite a bit since the start of Sigma. So in twenty twelve, when we started Sigma, we've actually looked at the data now and incredible the differences and how many designers are in the world.

For example, IBM in twenty twelve was at 70 to engineers, to every one designer in New York and that's a pretty crazy ratio. And in twenty seventeen we're excited again. They were at eight to one across their org and three to one on mobile. I think in addition to that, we're really seeing where that one designer to every six engineers or every engineer somewhere in that range. That's the target ratio for a lot of companies. Now, I think a design really, as you're defining how software works, design is really the you're trying to basically create a visual language that people can latch onto in order to solve a problem in software.

That means that I've got something that I want you to be able to do with my thing. I'm creating I'm trying to create the best visual metaphors for you to latch onto so that you can use this thing I've created depending on how far down the stack you go. I think of that as it didn't stop necessarily with the creation of a visual asset or artifact. Really, design is thinking about the entire software development process and end everything from how do you make it so that you're able to conceptualize the start of the process and figure out the right things to work on all the way to.

Is this app performance enough? I think what we've seen over the past decade as the cloud has become so mainstream, as developer tools have gotten better and better, is that it's not enough to build something anymore. It has to be incredibly well designed. And consumer expectations have risen so much due to, I think, the great consumer apps like Facebook or Gmail that we have in our lives now or Apple potentially with the phone. I think that what we're seeing is that companies that do not invest in design lose.

It's very much infected and markets where they start to have a competitor, where they are focused on design and trying to make design best in class for their users, those companies end up winning. That's why we're seeing such a rise in designer and also the rise of people who are non designers who want to engage in the design process or become designers themselves. One of the things that we've been very focused on with as part of why we're in the browser is it isn't just a in the collaborations that people across design process, marketing, engineering, product management, in fact, sales can engage with design, but also it makes it so that people can access design for the first time, because in our view, design is a skill that more people should have access to and be able to partake in.

I see design tools going the way that the word processor went. There was a time where word processing, you wouldn't use the word processor unless you were like a professional writer, but it wasn't like everyone used a word processor. And then over time, it very quickly became that, of course, everyone uses the word processor that said it's not because you have access to a word processor. You are an expert writer. There are people that specialize in writing.

And I see the same thing being true for design tools. It's going to become a core competency that everyone has to visually communicate. But at the same time, there'll be people that specialize that in our experts who say a bit more about what your principles are of good design.

The point resonates that people now demand stuff that's beautiful and works. It's incredibly competitive. People are lazy. They want their job done as easily as possible and with as much pleasure as possible. What principles have you extracted? You've probably seen more design work than anyone. What makes for great design?

I certainly have opinions here, but I would disagree. The premise that I've seen more than anyone, I think to me is the principles that we go back to time after time again at Sigma. One is this idea of keeping the simple things simple, but making the complex possible. And Sigma, for example, getting back to that point around accessibility, you should be able to accomplish basic tasks in Sigma without having to know much about the tool or having to study much.

And then there should also be for power users and people that are willing to go deep. You should have the ability to actually also engage in complex work. That shouldn't be the thing that is being subtractive from the accessibility of the overall tool. Another design principle that we think about a lot is direct manipulation. There's a difference between being able to manipulate something and have a direct feedback loop where. To see the value that you're changing and how that changes something, for example, one thing that we have introduced is called the art tool, where if you draw a circle, you can drag a sort of control point on the circle and change the angle and sort of the overall arc in a rapid fashion.

That's instead of having to go over to a panel and then enter a value and seen the art change when you update that value. We think it's really important to have those feedback loops in our tool.

You're reminding me very clearly of probably the most influential video I've ever seen from a guy named Bret Victor.

Exactly what was the inspiration for a lot of sigma was his invention on principle talk. And he has a lot of other great thoughts as well that I find incredibly inspiring. And also some great essays to his essay on different letters of abstraction is especially meaningful to me. Incredible.

Yeah, everyone has to go watch. And venting on principle seems like you've quite literally adopted one of the things that he shows, which is like the intimate relationship between creator and created thing with his little no interruptions between the paintbrush and the canvas, so to speak, and seeing the output of your choices. That's really interesting idea. What is most exciting about where you think we might be able to go? Where is that runway still exist?

Gosh, so much. I think as you think about what you can do with design tools and approachable visual tools in order to be able to freely express yourself on a canvas, translate your thoughts on the computer, but then the computer be able to figure out what the structure should be afterwards. I think that's one of the unique challenges of design tools. In order to create software, you have to have that structure. But people actually don't want it. They don't want to have a structured approach when they're initially trying to go through a free form design process.

That's when the tensions that I think we're constantly exploring. I mean, talking about Bret's work in particular, I'm quite interested to see how his spatial computing work plays out in the long term. So the idea that you should be able to have computers that are sort of accessible to people in physical space. So, for example, in Dynamic Land, which is one of his experiments in Oakland, he has created a machine that basically you're able to see all the source code on the walls and you can interact with it in a physical manner, create programs physically as well.

You know, it's still in its early days as our most research projects like this is something that could be a 10 plus year research project. But I'm quite excited to see how that impacts our idea of digital spaces, because, again, I think that the future of working with tools is not as one to one hammer nail relationship, but rather this move to workspaces and workshops. And that's sort of what I am excited by for the medium of the browser, is that it really forces you to think that way.

I'm really intrigued by I think it was Stuart Butterfield's idea that innovation is behavior change. The measure of innovation is how people are doing new things with new tools. This idea of some reduction in friction, unlocking new behavior is so fascinating to me. And the one that I'm most intrigued about with Sigma is this multiplayer concept. You would think of design as this very kind of solo effort and maybe even art or all creation. But I think what you've shown is that's not really true.

What behaviors have you been surprised by or intrigued by that were made possible by multiplayer design?

Well, I think that the thing that everyone believed might happen in the early days, the multiplayer, was that it would lead to design by committee. There's a very negative impression of it at first. So, for example, I think when we launch a designer news, there was a comment that said a camel is a horse designed by committee reference in our multiplayer feature. That's an interesting point of view. I'm very curious to see how this plays out.

And I think just the reality is that we've seen it play out almost the opposite way, which is fascinating to me that you can actually create these collective mindshare moments where people actually can get to simpler solutions rather than more complex ones. For example, Kimberly-Clark, when the pandemic hit, they were trying to make it so that their order form was more simple so people can get paper supplies via the toilet paper crisis. And one thing that they had to work through was that they had this order form, which was way overly complex.

They were able to get their entire team in Sigma, bring them all together, and then sort of work through how to get that form that I think had 13 fields in it together to reduce it to five fields in order to place an order. We've seen all these different examples of companies, I think, getting to better, simpler solutions in a multiplayer connected way, whereas you might assume that more cooks in the kitchen would actually lead to more complicated solutions.

Coming back to the early days of Sigma when the product was live and being used, at what point would you say you felt as though you had a real foothold with users that could be built upon and scaled?

What was that threshold?

I'm never answering this question because you kind of asking the question of when is market fitger? I like to think of it more as a market pull. It's almost like when you stumble upon. Something that should exist, people start to find it and they give you feedback and they start to pull the product out of you, and there are some things that are almost independent thought exercises like we're talking about before where you have to really there's conceptual leaps the market won't make for you.

And there's also just the vast majority of improvements that may come from a great degree of feedback from customers. And it's more of a question of making sure you listen to the right feedback. I think early on, one moment that stands out was I had done this use a research study with somebody that was working at Coursera at the time. And this is one thing that was total alpha stage. It's not even Alpha. In order to write text in Sigma, it would take minutes to write a sentence or two because it was so lagi, I do this.

So I brought a bottle of wine to the user study, met up at six p.m. and we collected the bottle of wine. I said, hey, I want you to try to complete this task and figure. And it took the guy a few hours and he was very encouraging though. And he said, I think this is a really exciting and meanwhile I'm just super embarrassed that I've made this guy take a few hours out of his night to go work in our tool.

That wasn't quite ready. But of course, I learned a lot. A few days later, he follows up with things like a ten page document of here, all the things that I think are going to be possible because of stigma. So much of it looking back, it's not like we use that to plan a roadmap, but so much of it looking back where things that we end up doing. I think that when you start to see that passion and you see that engagement from people, even when it's not working yet, that's a really good sign there.

Moment that fast forward a few years after that, that I realize very literally that we had probably market poll was when we had an early customer tell us, hey, Dylan, you've got a charge. And I'm like, oh, interesting. Why? I'm not sure that where the market's quite ready for it yet and we don't want her adoption and said, well, look, I'm trying to spread your tool inside of my big company and no one believes it's legit because you don't charge money and everyone thinks you can call it a business.

So please, we don't care what, just charge us something. And I was an example of a time when I went, oh, gosh, I think we have to charge really fast. We're actually hurting adoption by not pricing. And I was another example where I was like, OK, I think we might have right now.

What have you learned about pricing?

I asked this question a lot of software founders, because the costs of the software on a marginal basis are so low, which sounds amazing, but it actually creates kind of an interesting almost too many choices for how to price something. And you seem to have adopted this very clean, simple, progressive pricing structure. What have you learned and thought about that might be useful to other founders that haven't priced yet that are thinking about their strategy?

Pricing is such a big topic. We can spend hours in this. I think that the simple advice I'll give people that are designing our first pricing strategy is to not get to detail orange on it. I think the natural inclination of people who are technical is to go after super fancy conjoint analysis and try to create this really rigorous process through which you can figure out what your perfect pricing should be or engaging with a consulting firm or something. I think if you can design a few plans that you can show people and get their feedback on it, you'll learn so much from just talking to a few users about potential pricing and reading their body language.

Make sure that you do it either in person or over video giving covid seen how they just kind of viscerally would react to something I think is a good first step. That said, I think there's a lot of people who are really thoughtful about pricing. You should definitely research and learn about. And I think that you have to be also very honest with yourself about where the market is for us. For example, one of our intentional strategies was to make it so that viewers were free and stigma.

And we did that because we saw other competitors charge for viewers and also want to get more people into our tool with the hope that over time they become editors and that they see the power of AGMA for editing. Again, going back to our conversation about giving design tools to everyone, also make sure that you link your vision and strategy to your tactics.

What was the hardest challenge that you faced after product market pull? So between whatever that was and today, what's been the most difficult thing to navigate as you built the business?

Well, I was an intern before it was CEO of AGMA and just learning how to manage was really difficult for me. I had had leadership opportunities in the past before that. That's very different than management. And it was rocky early on the product. It took us a long time to get to market. It was something where I was maybe at 10 direct reports at the time or something like that, which is not what you would necessarily give it to.

First, a manager and my dad was passed away of cancer and I was an immensely stressful period of my own life and it was really hard. I think that the team at the time give me a lot of feedback that I didn't deal with. And thankfully, we got through it. It was not an easy period before we shipped. I think just the advice I give to others. There are these down moments as well as these at moments. And oftentimes they are right after each other have the super high and a start up and followed by super low or vice versa.

Ends up being that perseverance is a big part of what will ultimately to determine your success or failure, assuming that you have the runway to persevere if you were to compare yourself today as a manager to those early days.

You were struggling and kind of figuring it out on the fly trial by fire. Sounds like what are the most notable differences?

I think it's a lot of tactical stuff. This complex, mythical thing is just a series of behaviors and also just knowing your own style. One thing that I'm keen to learn how to do, but I've gotten a lot better at but still have so much room for growth is around giving context. It's easy to go into something and give people a reaction right away when there's a lot going on, but not unpack your reaction. And that's not useful for anyone.

I think another thing that is really important as a manager and leader is just sharing in. Some people can learn how to do this, see, especially people that are working roles like product we're buying as something that's critical to the function. But it just is something that you have to know when you need to get by and when you need to lead and say, no, we might disagree on this, but we're going to go in this direction. And I think that's something that I struggle with early on especially.

And I think also just it's maybe more of a leadership thing than a management thing, but showing progress and momentum. And I think that early on in the game, especially before launch, it just felt a never ending sprint after Sprint. And we weren't seeing the results. Those people didn't know if people would actually even care about what we were building on these sort of brief moments of clarity. If I was looking back and gave myself advice, I would say just do whatever you can to show people on the team that the market's going to care.

And I think that's so important for the team to go see that. Otherwise, you just don't know. And you're working for long stretches of our period of time that people will give a shit about what you're doing.

What was the most interesting thing you learned in the early days about effective recruiting? Obviously, for a company to get to where you're at, you need a lot of talented people and it's got to get past you. And you're obviously is very, very talented co-founder, it sounds like. But two people will not build a big company. What did you learn in the early days about when you should start recruiting for the next role, when you should be proactively replacing yourself in jobs that need to be done inside the business and attracting good talent?

I'll give an answer as if whoever is listening has capital to deploy and they're not constrained by that because it's a very different answer. Thankfully, capital was not our constraint. I think we raised early to round before we were out of style. Not everyone can do that. We're very thankful that we had the opportunity for recruiting. I mean, honestly, that was one of the things that was hardest from early on, was once I identify good candidates, I think I was pretty good at bringing them in.

But ID systematically as people that we went to work with and then sort of the follow up is just being rigorous about bringing those people into the company with something that is this a very process oriented thing to work on. And that was something that I struggled with for sure. And I think that there's just a lot of nuts and bolts around recruiting that you have to get. Right. So I think the most successful startups I've seen are ones where the founder is maniacal about bringing the best talent on board, thinks about it every day, and asking John Douar, who's a legendary venture investor, I said, Hey, John, we are really recruiting.

And I feel like I'm this is the area I'm worst at. What tips you have to get better at recruiting. And his advice is so simple. And it's stuck with me every day since not just working, but any problem, which is he asked me the following questions. He says, Dylan, when you get up in the morning, is the first thing that you think about recruiting was like, good point. I you think about it first thing in the morning.

And he goes every time you take a break during the day, do you think about recruiting? It's like a good point, because when you go to bed is the last thing you think about at night or not is like, well, you should do that. It's still there, right? I mean, you should have a spreadsheet of here are the people that are in various stages of our process, whether that's nurture this relationship for three years or actively interviewing.

And you need to then be thinking about it every moment in order to get those key hires. It has to be your top priority in terms of your question of when to replace yourself, when to start recruiting and really scaling the team. As soon as you start seeing product market fit market pull, that's when you should be pushing. And I wish that we had pushed harder on recruiting early on. In retrospect, that is one of the things that we could have been so much further than we are today.

If we had the team faster. I think we were just a little paralyzed not knowing what would work, what wouldn't work, want to keep Bernalillo, which are all good habits to have. But in reality, if you've got a big market that you're tackling, which we did do, and if you know that it might work, then I think it's your responsibility to push as hard as you can and move really quickly on that. And finally, in terms of replacing yourself as CEO or even as a sort of senior director level manager, I think that you have to do that constantly.

Otherwise you can't be strategic about your what you're up to.

If you're in the weeds doing Icee work, describe what it feels like to hire somebody that is a senior person that raises the bar for the organization. Like what impact? It's a lot of work to recruit. It's hard to wake up and go to sleep thinking about that sort of thing versus. Product and the exciting stuff of customers using and things like this, but it's the critical input to make the business good. So describe that payoff, I guess, of all that hard work recruiting.

Oh, I mean, when you find the right person to join as a partner in your business, it's incredible. I think of one example is Amanda Clay, who's our chief customer officer. She owns sales marketing support at Sigma. She was coming from Zendesk, where she was somebody who was our first marketing hire and scared them all the way to IPO and also ran self-service sales. So amazing background after an IPO. She was there for a bit and then she took a pretty sizable break.

And when we met her, she was not looking for her next role. We were lucky to even get the first meeting with her. But immediately I saw somebody who could bring our business the next level. And when she joined immediately, it became clear that we had brought on somebody as a partner who would really be someone that could help us build a business for the long term. It's been incredible to watch her in action and to learn from her and to see how she builds her organization and how she brings leadership to figure if you were to describe Sigma in a series of chapters.

What would the chapter titles? B to this point? And then I want to talk about what the next chapter might be.

Well, we talked about the existential dread chapter I started off that it's sort of I think of myself as sort of this like there's this period where we're in the small office in Palo Alto and sort of the garage chapter. I guess literally we work out of a garage. I know it's very stereotypical, but it was experimental still. But there is sort of a sense that there was something that was happening that could work. And then I think there was sort of the closed beta chapter where we had some in market, but it wasn't quite right yet.

But people were starting excited about it. There is potentially the launch chapter in the chapter where now is where, despite having Kriegsman for interface design, we're seeing that people are using it for all sorts of other use cases to be present for brainstorming, for cream slide decks, for pitches and board meetings where you've seen people creating games and sigma. We're seeing people making animations. And Fatemah, we're seeing people prototype hardware stuff in Sigma, which sounds so crazy, but it's true.

Yeah, I think the chapter now is how do we take all those inputs and all the stuff we're seeing the market and really create different experiences and tools that are more accustomed to those use cases, as well as make a more global design community, that people can bring their sort of knowledge and their resources to meet other people and really create that third space for design. Your first space is your home. Your second space is the office. Now, that's emerged because of its I mean, it's one space on two spaces, but the third space is sort of where you go to pursue an interest.

And I hope that I could do that for the world of design and software before we get to maybe some of the chapters to come.

We'll save that for later in the conversation. I'd love to hear a bit about the nuts and bolts of both product and distribution, obviously the things that drive any business. I'll start with distribution since everyone usually talks about product first. What's interesting about multiplayer, of course, is that almost naturally the product itself, if it's good, has the users invite others into the game, which is product growth and really cool and probably a great way to distribute a product.

What beyond that have you done that's been really effective. Like if you had to describe the secret to success for Sigma and spreading the tool, what would you point to?

I think a lot of it is creating a product that is accessible to people and making sure that there's this concept of progressive disclosure. People can hopefully learn the product very quickly, but then have a road to mastery that maybe as long, but it's not going to get in their way right away and then making sure that people have a reason to share and bring other people in the process. And I think that that last one to get there is to really focus on workflows.

There's going to be particular to people building productivity applications versus anything else. But I think that if you look at the workflows that people have already and the way they engage with others and their teams and understand those and build around those, but in a way that's still simple and not overly structured, that can create a lot of magic.

What do you think the hardest thing would be to copy about Sigma right now, even if you had a ton of time and money and talent? Yeah, well, I mean, our competitors do. And I and I have respect for them, too. I mean, we're all going after this sort of same goal of trying to make design tools better for the world. And so I really appreciate that. The fact that we're in the browser, I'd say, is our greatest aid.

But it's also a ton of work to get right. Making things load really fast. You have to have one version of the product. Most tools have updates and if you have plug ins, those also have updates. And in Sigma, there's always one version for the app for plug ins. And to make that work correctly is very difficult. Multiplayer, of course, in scaling multiplayer is non-trivial. That's all stuff that we've kind of honed over the course of many years now would be difficult to clone overnight.

I'm really interested based on the self serve product, you can go and buy it and start using it very quickly, which I've done. Therefore, you probably have tons of individual customers. People have problems. And because there's so many people, I'm sure that dealing with users and trying to make them. As many as happy as possible is a big part of what makes you guys successful. What have you learned about that part of the business of maybe disgruntled users or people that aren't happy with the service and trying to do your best to serve them as well?

Well, I think it's a mindset thing. I think if you can get to the point, especially early on, where you see every time that someone's unhappy, the product is as them giving you valuable feedback. That is where the ultimate mindset to be. And because then you can hopefully take those people that are unhappy, take their feedback and incorporate and make a change and follow up with them. And if we do that time and time again, those people who are very vocally unhappy might become your biggest advocates as well.

And I've literally seen that flip for a lot of our customers that are now evangelists stigma. These are people that started very vocally not believing in Sigma. These are people who can be vocal either way, but hopefully can get on your side and build community and bring them in. And of course, you have to distinguish who's a troll, who is giving useful feedback and wants to help. But the people that want to help actually want to help. The best advice I can give there is to really be actively listening to your community and to try to engage them sort of more proactive, positive way.

In a similar vein, can you spend a minute describing the community's platform, what that is, what the thinking is behind it and why it's important for the business?

Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things I'm most excited about, stigma, and it's still very early, but we're super excited about it. And that's the ability to basically create a digital space across everyone using Sigma, where people can share resources and communicate around design. I think that there's lots of news out there, but a lot of them are more focused on this polished work and almost creative portfolio. Whereas for Sigma, we're hoping to create an environment where people are really sharing work in progress, making sure that they're able to easily remix other people's content to kind of contribute to this global design.

And again, be that third space design, where people can come to hang out and engage with their passion around design, whether they're experienced professionals or hobbyists or people that are new to the craft. Looking to learn.

One of my favorite topics is as a business like yours grows when it first starts to feel that kind of sharp elbow aspect of competition. You're not the only designed tool out there. I've heard rumors. There's others.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just one or two other ones. I actually remember using Photoshop as a kid, like a lot in high school and before. Some of these are big, long standing tools. How do you think about competition? Maybe ask differently. What have you learned about thinking about competition, whether or not it's useful if you try to spend more or less time on it, talk about that kind of sharp elbow part of this whole life?

Well, first of all, talk directly about Sketch and Adobe. I think Adobe historically for the space, Adobe actually had a really amazing product and fireworks, which was an acquisition they made through media fireworks, was killed right around the time that we started really focusing fully on interface design. And part of the reason that we started focusing nervous systems because we went, wow, we don't know why they did it, but Adobe just killed their best shot at really tackling this market.

And I think they did it because probably there's a lot of code that I'm sure is a very rational decision made Adobe. But it really created an opening for both us and such and such as a team out of Europe, which they did have something incredible in terms of capturing that momentum and that need for the community around interface design by building a tool that was very custom for that use case. It is a Mac app. And they did in a very bootstrapped way, too, which again, mad respect.

And I think we looked at sketch early on and I literally said in my Sepich, I think I describe sketch as sort of like this buggy tool that's very Endi and I really worry about it. And I think that at the time they we're not as focused on quality, but instead they focused on getting to market, getting in front of customers and making sure they solve this case. And the result of that was that they were able to create an amazing business, which a lot of designers have.

It's changed their lives by focusing on that use case and there will be a market by years. I think one reflection is that you can be perfectionistic, but the sort of typical advice around launching earlier when you're uncomfortable about launching is not bad advice. And I definitely think that if we launched it earlier, it would have made a big difference for us. Looking back. Second reflection, it's just that you can't forget your core, you can't ignore your community.

And I think doing so is your own peril. In the case of Adobe, I also have a lot of gratitude towards Adobe. I mean, they're sort of the daddy of the space. They've created so much. And I think the entire space has learned so much from them. Literally at the start of Sigma, as we re-examined our vector model, I was watching videos from the late nineteen eighties where John Hancock was introducing Illustrator to try to understand what was it that they were going after and why hasn't it changed since?

The reality is that they've created a lot of core foundational principles and models that have withstood the test of time. And so I think you have to really appreciate you're going up against an incumbent.

Reminds me to ask you a broader question, just about creator tools more generally about design. Obviously in the news, though, has been things like unity and epic again. Sort of engines that allow other creative people to move faster to create the thing that they want. How would you describe the entire landscape and the important aspects of that landscape today? What do you think we see in the next five years or so as that continues to evolve?

I think we're in the midst of a sea change from consumption to creation. I think that people are recognizing that they spend a lot of time looking at things on their own and refreshing news feeds. I think that people are starting to realize that this is a time where they can use computers and phones and technology to go create and add to the conversation, add their voice to the world's attention to just consuming the media that other people create for them. I am extremely bullish and always have been on the possibilities of creative tools as businesses in terms of allowing for that self-expression.

I think that as we look at the broader market, this is a trend that's accelerating as people have more time. And I think as our economy changes, we're going to have to grapple with some real questions around who is in the labor force and who isn't and the sort of terms like attention and autonomy have been turned around. But I think that there's just going to be a huge rise in independent creators. And I think that there's also some possible to look at just the market alone without looking at the funding models to things like Patreon are extremely exciting as these other models of being able to connect creators with their fans in terms of making sure that they're able to generate sustainable revenue over time.

I really do believe that we're moving more towards that economic model over time.

What are some of the other creator tools that you would highlight? This is a huge topic right now. I think everyone is engaged with some form of these things, even if it's just creating a story on Instagram. That's a simple version of a creator tool. What are some of the others outside of Sigma that you think are the most interesting that people might not have heard of so many interesting tools out there right now across all content types.

There's, for example, for document creation. We're seeing awesome things around the way that people organize their thoughts, whether it's Chota or Knowshon or Roehm or paper. I think when it comes to video editing, there's a lot of interesting things with products like awing or descriptor reduc. I think there's I mean, MySpace, really. There's so much that's happening right now. Just incredibly exciting moment for productivity and creativity.

If you squint a little bit and look forward five years, I'll come back to that kind of next chapter question and let's make the assumption that Sigma is 10 times the size in terms of its business size today, measured through revenue or whatever. What do you think will be most responsible for that? 10X is a big change. What would have to happen or do you think would have to happen as the key levers for that kind of explosion and growth for Sigma?

The boring answer is that I actually think the market is so huge already that if we keep on our current track and keep accelerating and keep becoming the best in industry and provide our customers with what they need, I think there's a direct path to 10x from where we are today. But I think that the things that will help accelerate even further and make us get there faster, really, really, that's the conversation we're having earlier around the broadening of what it means to be a designer in the first place.

And I think the design develop a ratio point I brought up before around IBM and sort of how the ratio of designers, developers is changing across all these different companies. I think it honestly becomes an irrelevant point soon. I think a lot of people that are developers will start identifying as designers. For example, I was on a call recently with somebody who mentioned to me that their developer was just so thankful because they, with Sigma, actually could do design work for the first time.

And I think it's partially about lowering the barrier to entry to the design process. And so that for us, I hope we'll both represent acceleration in the number of designers across the world, even if they don't necessarily call themselves designers on LinkedIn, whether it's within Sigma, the business or really anywhere in life or business.

What question are you most curious about answering or trying to answer right now?

I'm very curious to see how trends of increased authoritarianism around the world impact society and also how technology can help combat that in particular. I'm very interested in the nature of privacy and how we can continue to use technology to increase privacy, individual liberties. I think that going back to that idea of digital spaces, we shouldn't have an expectation of that in digital spaces. Everything we do is tracked and that I think that over time we need to be combating that.

Certain civilizations have gone the complete opposite direction. They've shown now that it's possible to have complete surveillance of your citizens. I think it's a responsibility of technologists around the world to make it so that that's not the case. And I think that you have to look not just at tracking and sort of what people log about people using their digital products, but also need to look at things like currency, as we assume from a cash economy. Using more digital currency, how do you make sure that that remains private?

I think it's also really important to make it so that people are able to navigate these spaces in a free way. Like if I walked on the street, I don't expect that people will follow me and I don't expect people to track my every move. And so how do you make it so that people are able to do that in digital environments as well on the privacy side?

My view would be the cat feels like to me as a non technologist out of the bag, I just sort of feel like my privacy is much less than maybe I wish it was. But in exchange, I get to use the digital tools and world. That is so interesting. What do you think? If that were to reverse course and the trend over the next 10 years was towards more digital privacy, like what are the big chunky things that could make that possible?

You mentioned currency, maybe digital currency that's very secure and private. What else would matter, do you think, to create a more private digital world?

Yeah, I mean, first off, I'd point out that people made that argument about, well, the cat's out of the bag 10 years ago and look at all the change we've seen over the last decade. They made the same argument 10 years before that two. We've had this gradual change in the way that privacy expresses and what that even means because there's no stable definition of privacy. The best definition I came up with is it's the delta between your expectation what happens and you can define a violation of privacy and what that feels like, but you can't necessarily define what privacy is really.

I haven't figured out how to do that yet. And so I think that it starts with people realizing that there is actually something to be private about and that deep private matters. I think that there's a sort of the typical argument here that people use against privacy as well. If you have nothing to hide, what are you scared of? And I think that what we see is that, for example, there are state laws that contradict national laws around, let's say, sodomy, for example.

I think that there are still anti sodomy laws in the books. In some states. There's all these different examples of different social behaviors that people do. You expect to be private. And I think in order to protect our minorities and people that are engaging in all sorts of behaviors, you need to have a default private approach to basically everything. And I know that's maybe an extreme view, but I think that we're starting to see a sea change here.

One example is the Black Lives Matter protest and the adoption of single. I think that people for the first time have realized that their communications being trapped, they are uncomfortable with that and they're adopting digital tools that allow them to communicate more privately. And I think that we're going to see that same desire express itself in many other areas as well.

Fascinating topic that I haven't thought a ton about that seems like we could probably spend hours talking about. Unfortunately, we've got just a couple more minutes here, and I thought I'd move to two of my favorite closing questions, one that I ask sometimes, one that I ask every time. The first is just for some thoughts or advice that you might leave people early on in some sort of building process. That could be a creative process. It could be building a business, someone that's devoting themselves to building.

What advice would you give them based on your experience building Sigma?

The things that come to mind first are validate, but you can validate, have faith in what you can't and give yourself as much time as you can. I think a lot of times I talked on a few words to say I'm going to try this for six months because how much savings I have and then if it doesn't work, I'll go back to whatever I'm doing. And we're very privileged in having the fellowship, which is hundred over two years, in order to support ourselves for as long as for up to two years of time to build and export.

If we stopped after six months, we didn't have anything that points. There is not a direction that we had figured out. It took nine to 12 months before we had sort of the first inkling of what figure could be. It just takes time to build things that are meaningful. And so I encourage anyone who can figure out a way to create that space and time for themselves to do so and to persevere through the inevitable lows and highs that come along with the nature of existential exploration in those times.

I love that.

I don't think I've gotten that specific answer before so that one will stand out in memory. My traditional closing question for everybody is to ask for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you.

Wow. Gosh, there's so many things that people have done for me. I mean, my parents for just bring me to this world and also raising me in a household of love and support and kindness. And I've done so many opportunities along the way from people who had no reason to give me them, just out of the sort of kindness of their heart. For example, my first internship at a rally was something that basically let me break into tech more, and that was in high school.

And the folks that really were supporters and figured out early on as well, that was through a friend's dad who was the right guy. Obviously, just the internships I got on the way. I didn't have the skills necessarily to necessarily have those internships and rather as people that were leaving me and every step along the way, I feel like I've encountered kindness and love from people. And I have so much gratitude, although this has been so fun.

It's such a pleasure to meet you. A fascinating company that you're building. Really appreciate all the time and all the insights today.

Patrick, thanks so much for having me. This episode was brought to you by Doc, sent in this for. Part mini series, I sit down with Docs and CEO and co-founder Russ Shettleston to hear the origins of docs and the problems that solving and what the future may hold. In this week's episode, Docs and CEO Russ Shettleston and I discuss the future of Docs End and what new features they're going to be rolling out soon.

Talk to me a little bit about what you see over the next couple of years, the trends that you think Docs will be a part of in terms of new products or new features. Like what do you think especially? I mean, I have to imagine covid has, like so many businesses, really changed yours as well. So what have you seen so far in twenty twenty? And how does that impact your view of where doxxing may go in the future?

This has been an interesting year for all of us, for sure, for docs, and I'm very thankful that we're already growing quickly and have continued to grow quickly through it. Certainly not being able to meet in person has impacted different industries. If we just take fundraising as an example, we do a lot of research on fundraising as well just because it's a personal interest of mine and it's good for the business. But it took more meetings over Zoome for investors and founders to feel comfortable with each other.

And so founders needed to send out even more texts and emails to an even larger number of investors. And so the utility of docs and just increases as you need to pay more people trying to raise money. And it's also more critical that you actually get that round done if your business is in a tough spot. Production is a business over the next few years. I think it's a pretty clear path for us. Going back to the mission statement for the company, we know that if we add the rest of the data and feature set, we'll be able to go compete head to head with Interlinks or Merrill.

But we also know that once we have the rest of the e-signature features, that we can compete head to head with DocuSign or filicide. So it'll be really interesting to see as we keep solving problems for our users, what new use cases crop up and what new requests we get for adding to docs. And so I think for us, as long as we just keep building great software, that's intuitive and easy to use. I think the future is bright.

Rusnak for existing users of docs and and I imagine many or most listening have at least been on the receiving end of a docs end and peruse the document that way. What can they expect over the coming year?

As a company, we spend most of our money on engineering and product, so we've been hiring on that team like mad and the plans that they have. And what we're going to be adding to the product are very discrete. In the data room use case, we're going to be adding the ability to have on a per linked basis, granular permissions. So if I'm going through a fundraiser or going through M&A, I'll be able to send a Earling basis.

You, Padraic, can only see these folders or these supporters, but other people can see these other upholders and that'll be really useful. So you can keep everything in one spot but have the granular control you want over who can access it. And then we'll also be adding in a notification system. So if you're updating documents and docs, send in your space, you'll be able to patch up notifications and send them off to the recipient's. OK, we change this page or we change this file or here the four or five files we change.

So that notification form is going to say a lot of back and forth and we'll bring a lot of clarity on the e-signature front. What we've got today is pretty basic, but we're going to be coming out with forms and fields so you can just drag and drop forms and fields. And then we'll also be adding and workflows for multiparty site. And so once you add in those things, you can really use docs. And as a data room in any situation you want to, then you'll be able to use docs and for any sort of e-signature functionality and then you sort of workflow.

You have their sales or H.R. onboarding or testing. It will be great for all those use cases.

I would imagine at some point we'll also add video support as well, which is something we're commonly asked for, whereas I certainly have been subject to that growth plan of yours because it's come at me from all directions and I love using it. So thanks so much for sharing all this information with us today and for being a partner.

Thank you, Patrick. To find more episodes or sign up for our weekly summary, visit, Investor Field Guide dot com. Thanks for listening to Founders' Felgate.