Figma (NYSE:FIG) co-founder and CEO Dylan Field offered a candid look at why some of the most powerful people in tech spend weekends tinkering with AI like teenagers in a garage, speaking at the Hard Fork Live event.
The framing came from a host who floated a theory that Silicon Valley CEOs obsess over vibe coding because it reconnects them with the early joy of building. Field partially agreed, saying “people like to make things,” and added that the impulse to put ideas into the world in a tangible way will extend far beyond CEOs.
Vibemath and the Verifiable Domains
Field said he personally explores new AI capabilities, including what he calls “vibemath,” using AI to work through math problems. He was careful to note he has “no results” yet from those experiments. This is personal tinkering, not a Figma product.
The insight is sharper. Design is subjective. Math is not. “Things are correct or they’re not,” he said, and “in the verifiable domains models are very good at now.” That distinction matters for investors trying to figure out where large language models compress value and where they leave room for human judgment.
Exploration Without Payoff
Field’s philosophy of exploration connects vibemath to his day job. “You don’t know how it’s going to pay off or what benefit it will have, but it ends up having some benefit in weird ways you can’t expect,” he said. He pointed to early work with WebGL as the curiosity that eventually led to Figma, and to early enthusiasm for NFTs, then called “crypto collectibles,” as another example of unstructured tinkering.
Pushing Back on “Design Is Dead”
The exploratory tone sits against a tougher backdrop. Figma recently launched an ad campaign pushing back on the “design is dead” narrative, which Field framed as one of many AI-era hot takes. On the Q2 2025 earnings call, he made the company’s position explicit: “Today, virtually every business is becoming a software business, and AI has made software easier than ever to create. In this world, we believe your design, your craft, and your brand’s point of view is what’s going to make your product and your company stand out. Design is now the differentiator. It’s how companies win or lose.”
The market has not been convinced. FIG closed at , down and . The market cap sits near $8.26B.
Field’s signals from the earnings call match the philosophy. “You should expect to see significant investments in our AI efforts,” he said, warning that “margins to come down in the near term as we invest in the long term.” Q2 2025 revenue hit $250 million, up 41% year over year, with a net dollar retention rate of 129%.
The kid-in-a-garage energy is real. Whether shareholders share Field’s patience for the payoff remains the open question.
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