Figma's answer to the AI software sell-off
My chat with CEO Dylan Field ahead of today's earnings call. Also: Snap loses its head of Specs right before the big launch, and OpenAI poaches another key Meta exec.
Happy hump day. I didn’t make it to LA court to watch Mark Zuckerberg testify in the big social media kids’ safety trial, but I did get a kick out of the judge telling everyone in the courtroom that they’d be held in contempt for wearing the Meta glasses.
“The better the model output gets, the better Figma gets”
Ahead of Figma’s earnings call today, I asked CEO Dylan Field whether the company’s new Claude Code integration reflected a formal commercial partnership with Anthropic. “Pretty much purely organic,” he told me. “We talked with the engineers, and then we got marketing involved.”
The Anthropic integration is more about a model Field wants to replicate across the agentic coding landscape. “There are many players that I think we should do this with in the future,” he said, describing the MCP server architecture Figma has built as infrastructure that’s extensible to any coding tool that wants to route into its design canvas.
Figma’s stock had fallen roughly 85% from its post-IPO high before Wednesday’s earnings results, caught in the same sell-off punishing SaaS companies perceived to be in AI’s path of domination. On the earnings call, a Morgan Stanley analyst put the anxiety plainly, asking Field if he was “letting the fox into the henhouse” by partnering so openly with Anthropic. Field noted that virtually every frontier lab already uses Figma to design how they bring their models to users.
When I pushed him on the more extreme version of that fear, whether a sufficiently capable agent could eventually render Figma itself redundant, he pointed to two things.
