How Figma's CMO thinks about community as a channel

Speaker A: The most critical things that marketing does, it's identify and understand your audience incredibly well.

Speaker B: You can actually move market share that quickly if you're able to take like big swings.

Speaker A: Market share doubled in three months in some of our test markets.

Speaker B: What a data tells a story that's gotta be told. It's the art and the science getting the numbers right. Brandformance. Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of brandformance. Today I'm going to be joined by Sheila Vashi, who is the CMO at Figma and leads marketing, customer support, comms, brand and growth. Sheila is quite a special character. She actually started investment banking at Morgan Stanley, did corporate strategy at Gap, worked at Apple, worked at Dropbox, Opendoor Ethos, some of the most category defining brands. And now she's been at Figma for the last three years taking them public and is expanding their presence in all things design. So let's dive straight in with Sheila Vashi. All, uh, right, Sheila, uh, we're finally doing this. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while and we've known each other for a while. It's almost a decade. Can you imagine that?

Speaker A: I know, I can't believe I've been putting up with you for a decade. Pranav. There we go.

Speaker B: Oh my God. Okay, so thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. It's gonna be a really fun conversation because I feel like you are an n of 1 and I don't mean this just to butter, uh, you up. Like I generally feel I was looking at your background, I was like, wait, you did corporate strategy at Gap, you did investment banking, you did vc, you did marketing at two pre IPO companies, and now you're a CMO at a public darling of the product and tech landscape at figma. So I want to start with were these conscious choices in your career to kind of, you know, go from these very different domains or was it happenstance? Like, tell me about sort of how you think about a, um, modern marketer's career and what that looks like.

Speaker A: Well, first of all, thank you so much for the kind introduction. If I had known how nice you were going to be to me, then I would, um, have done this way sooner. Prana. Just kidding. But, um, no, but thank you. I will say, like career wise, it has been less kind of consciously planned and more me following my interest area. So I have always enjoyed and loved kind of like finance generally and analytics, which is why I initially went into investment banking out of college in that role. I missed kind of A more creative and team oriented environment and so made a switch to a few companies. From there, as, you know, went to Dropbox where you and I had a chance to work together. Together. I was really excited about the early stage potential of the company and you and I had a front row seat to the rapid growth there. And so from there really took on roles where I thought the challenges were interesting. And many times through that learned a new skill set that allowed me to continue to expand and think about the next thing. So it's less around kind of orchestrating a career and more around finding challenges that really interest me.

Speaker B: All right, so let's talk about that, uh, a little bit. Right. So a finance background, a more sort of analytical mindset married with, you know, marketing and the more creative and the art side of the house. Do you feel that if you, you know, for young marketers, folks who are just entering, you know, the workforce, and that that's a whole other saga, right, of uh, like how challenging it must be in this current environment. Do you think that folks, when they're starting off, should focus more on the math side of things or the art side of things? Do you think it's possible to do both early in your career? Like, how do you think about that?

Speaker A: I think, uh, look, the reason marketing is so interesting is it's one of the few functions and career paths that truly to be successful and unique is a, is a blend of both. And you always want to have an understanding of. I don't know if I would call it math, but how to run a business. To be a good marketer, to be a good business leader, you have to understand the dynamics of how the funnel works, how a P and L works, what's important for the business to sustain in the long term. And so that will always be critical no matter what role you're in, but especially for a marketer, because proving value and showing ROI is, is so much harder because so much of the work is intangible. Now that said, the art and work that elicits emotion is what inspires people and it's what sets you apart and it's what makes you stand out in a really crowded market. So to be unique and to be exceptional at your job, you really do need to either have the ability to span both or know how to encourage and build a team that can span both. No one is good at everything, but you have to be able to encourage and create an environment where both of those things can thrive. And that combination is what makes really good marketing, in my opinion. And I think now more than ever, being able to curate both and especially understand the value of the way that the creative can interact with your audience and set you apart. And having the judgment and the taste to figure out what is actually good marketing is more important than that because there's unlimited possibilities and unlimited directions you can go with AI and the tools available. And so knowing being able to exercise the judgment of what is good and what will connect with your audience is, you know, becoming, you know, another layer of skill that marketers have to develop.

Speaker B: Okay, so confession time. I was, you know, I was a computer science major and I came into this, this sort of tech ecosystem, you know, 15 years ago thinking that, oh, like, you know, you go and become a strategist or a product manager, and then there was the growth title. And, you know, over the course of like 10 or 15 years, I was like, all right, this is all just marketing, you know, and I had to like, learn that from, um, sort of first principles. And I'd never gone to school for marketing. I don't think you ever went to school for marketing, but maybe, maybe I got that wrong. How do you sort of think about the core marketing skill sets? Right? People say taste, people say, like, what connects with your audience? To me, that's psychology. That is, you know, understanding, sort of almost anthropology. It's like understanding human beings is a very different domain and most of us don't study it before we become marketers. So how do you educate yourself? What do you tell your team to do to really go deep on the, on that side of the house? Because the rest I think you can learn fairly, fairly easily. But that stuff is hard, isn't it?

Speaker A: I think, look, boiling it down to the most critical things that marketing does, it's actually pretty simple, right? It's identify and understand your audience incredibly well. So maybe there's some psychology in that, but really I think it's actually more like research, like deep research and understanding and spending time listening to them speak and listening to calls and becoming really well versed in them as an audience and what they care about. That's the first thing. Because if you don't understand them, then all of the judgment and the, in the taste, et cetera, isn't calibrated on the right data set, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing is identify the means to reach them, the channels, the ways to reach them that will uniquely connect with them. So for Figma, our community is incredibly important channel for us to reach our target, and they have sought us out in so many ways. And they have, they've built, you know, volunteer organizations through Friends of Figma, hundreds of them around the world. But that has become a really unique channel effectively and that we have many other channels that we use, but very unique and special channel for Figma to reach those users. And then the third piece is then build systems to optimize those channels. That's it. That's what marketing is at the end of the day. Really understand your user and build a whole data set around them that tunes your own intuition around what they want. Then find unique ways to reach them that will break through and then optimize and create a message and build a system for messages that reach those users. And something that's really interesting is our CEO Dylan has a really finely tuned judgment and intuition, um, around our core customers. He really does. And that has been built over years and years and tens of years of just listening to conversations, having conversations, building that extensive data set of uh, information of what they care about. And so that's how you build that kind of judgment to build the systems that scale. But it's really those three things at the end of the day, that's what marketing is.

Speaker B: Okay, I like that. And that's a very interesting point. Right, so you brought up Dylan and he's obviously sort of, I think he was a Thiel fellow and he started like when he was probably what, like 17, 18, like. So, uh, I don't know his story that well, but I know he was sort of a prodigy. How do you think about the CEO's role when it comes to marketing? Like I've heard some people describe, like the CEOs, the real CMO. How do you think about that as a CMO? And like the point that you just mentioned that his judgment or intuition or whoever is in the founder's seat, how much they sort of understand deeply versus how you understand deeply. So, uh, talk to me about that relationship. What does that look like week to week for you?

Speaker A: I think it depends on the role the CEO plays in the company. So like for Dylan, he is such, he kind of represents the company in so many ways and like his message is the company's message. And so being really kind of in tune with him is very important for us. There are other companies that don't opt that way that you know, that have built other systems and other ways to kind of get messages out. But for us it is very important that we have that alignment. He is the, he's the chief spokesperson for the company, period. And so having that alignment on what we're trying to say and what we're trying to achieve is incredibly important.

Speaker B: Got it. Okay. You also brought up this concept of community, and I think you all have done just such a fantastic job of that. I was scrolling through your TikTok and I'll be honest, I did not get all the jokes and the memes on your TikTok.

Speaker A: What did you find on our TikTok? I'm afraid to ask.

Speaker B: No, no. So the average TikTok had something like, you know, 7,000, 8,000 sort of views, and then there was a couple that had like 45,000, 250,000. Right. Like, so you see those sprinkles of viral moments and they were all kind of inside jokes. Right? So this is like if you're in Figma, and most of them were like the core sort of design product and I'm not a designer by, you know, by profession, but I was like going through it. I'm like, okay, I don't really get this, but there's 250,000 people who are, you know, commenting, liking on these. So you all deeply understand that when you think about sort of your team, how do you structure that community effort? Is it as simple as, like, hey, there are every single channel where your audience is, and in this day and age, it's everything. Right. I don't think there's a channel where you wouldn't find a community of FIGMA users and then you just let them lose and like run on their own. Like, what, what is the. How do you orchestrate that, uh, that community effort?

Speaker A: So it actually, the community effort extends way beyond the team that is operating our social channels. And I mean, that's a crack team and I'll talk about them in a second. They're amazing. But the way that we think about community starts with, I mean, really, like it's, it's everyone at the company. So it starts with us listening on across all avenues to our users. So, you know, first we're the whole company engineers. Dylan, our exec team is all on social, responding to people, making sure that we understand their needs. When there's feedback on how something's working, we're listening to it or taking it immediately, sharing it back, making sure that we can address it right away. So the whole company's tuned around that we have a global support team that is always responding to tickets and questions immediately. So we can make sure we're hearing what's, what's happening and keeping it top of mind. And those insights inform our product Roadmap and we, you know, iterate very quickly to make sure that we're addressing needs that we hear. And then on top of that we have an advocacy team across design and developers that is interacting with users every day, going to meetups, going to events, across social, across other forums to make sure that we're connecting with users regularly. We have a community team that represents the Friends of Figma which is a volunteer, a set of volunteer organizations over 240 chapters around the world that their role is to evangelize figma. And these are all volunteers, they do it on our behalf and they come together at events like Config and other events that we have worldwide. And then on uh, that entire base our amazing social team is able to take all of that content, whether it's from the advocacy team, whether it's from Friends of Figma, whether it's from other users and represent that on our social channels. And so that is, we've achieved that kind of if you know, you know, style of content. But that's from all of these millions of touch points we have across the whole company. And um, we've tuned our processes to make sure that we're listening to our users and what they need.

Speaker B: That sounds uh, incredible and I feel like a lot of, you know, I feel like notion is a good example, similar, uh, sort of example where they have this like massive upswell of community sort of volunteers efforts. And it's, you know, I was at a company called Magella Magento which became Adobe Commerce. Not to bring up Adobe in this conversation, but Magento had this whole open source ecosystem. Never. Yeah, um, Magento had this whole open source ecosystem and what happened is you had Magento developers, Magento designers, Magento plugin creators and all of this like that, that ecosystem was bigger in the net value that was being generated than Magento itself as a company. Right. And I think it's the same pattern that you're seeing where the economic value being created by the community is so much larger than just like, hey, Figma's, you know, core business. And that's probably what's reflected here, right? Why people are showing up in those, you know, Friends of Figma sort of chapters for friends of Figma, like how did you all sort of discover that this was happening and how did you decide to amplify it? Because it's a lot of work, right? Like you don't, you have to show up, you have to support it, you have to encourage it and then you have to go in front of the board and Dylan be like, hey, we're going to keep investing, you know, a uh, significant amount of money and effort and resources to make this happen. How did that all happen? How did you have to make a case for. It was like, the first time it happened, it was like, all right, let's just do it.

Speaker A: Honestly, it all happened organically around the product. So Figma, uh, kind of uniquely tapped into this sentiment and community that existed around the product that Dylan and the company early very much nurtured. So, you know, Dylan and the team would travel around the world for meetups and I've seen photos from, you know, really meetups around the world, from India to Nigeria to countries in EMEA M. So really all over the world in the early days just to meet with users and hear what was top of mind for them and what they wanted from the product. But it all sort of happened organically around the product. And I think one note that I wanted to hit that we were talking about earlier when we were talking about kind of the, the marketing piece of it. What you see on, um, social is really the tip of the iceberg, frankly. The work is just through the whole company on really connecting, understanding our users. And so there's this huge foundation that supports what you might see in our external messaging that is built around this community.

Speaker B: Got it. And do you have sort of local, sort of teams in different parts of the world who are then, you know, working with the community in that fashion or like you all aren't like a massive organization, right? How do you make we're not a massive organization?

Speaker A: Yeah, we do have offices around the world though. We have, um, 10 or 11 offices around the world and we're always opening up new ones. And we have folks there on marketing, on sales and support across many, many teams to be able to reach the community. But also customers make sure they have what they need and just kind of create those touch points with users all over the world. So we do have people located regionally. It's important for us to also understand sentiment on the ground and what's happening and what people care about, because that varies quite a bit. And so that's actually a really important touch point for us.

Speaker B: Are your regional marketing efforts quite different from each other or are they fairly consistent across different geographies?

Speaker A: I would say the tactics are, uh, fairly consistent, but the content and the messages and what people care about varies quite a bit based off of the stage you know, people are at and the needs they have of us. And there's always different flavors of things that People want, for example, in Germany people are, you know, um, customers are. What's top of mind for customers is security and administration and how uh, do they manage their teams and that defers based on region a little bit.

Speaker B: Hey folks, thanks for listening to this podcast today. If you're enjoying the show and if you're getting value out of it, we'd really appreciate if you drop us a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app. Okay, I want to pivot the conversation a little bit to the finance background that you have and how that has impacted your approach to marketing. So first, do you. And you have been a very quant heavy marketer as well, right? So uh, if I'm not wrong, at ethos at Opendoor, like you ran a whole bunch of performance marketing that was done in a very sort of intellectually rigorous way. Do you feel like the pendulum swung too hard in that direction? And have you changed anything about your approach at figma? I'm curious what that has been like.

Speaker A: I think that the pendulum has always swung back and forth constantly. Right. So for, for a while there, you know, several years ago it was all growth marketing and teams were operating almost like a trading desk in terms of resource allocation across different channels. And then a few years ago, you know, Brian Chesky famously said that they don't have any performance marketers and everything is brand. And so and it always, the trends always swing back and forth. I think it always comes down to at the end of the day, those three things that I talked about, which is who is your user, how do you reach them? And then from there, what are the channels that are most effective? And sometimes those are paid channels. Therefore you need what might be called more traditionally growth or performance marketing. Or they might be organic channels or there's a combination of both. And generally at uh, companies you see a couple breakthrough, right? Not you don't see everything for every company. It never works like that, but there are a couple that are very effective and that breakthrough. And so for Figma, community is a big one. But we also have a number of growth channels that are very effective for us. And we've been investing in SEO and GEO and those types of things just because organic is so strong. And then finally you have to have the layer of brand and inspiration and kind of that emotional brand building that sets you apart from everything else. And I would say at uh, Figma, that layer is really important to us. Very, very important to us because it's important to our community and important to our users. And we invest a lot in making sure that that creative really shines through and connects with what our users really expect from us. Because that is what they deliver. They deliver uh, craft and attention to detail and taste at every stage of their work. So we have to reflect that too.

Speaker B: That's a very interesting point. Does that increase, does that like raise the bar for creative execution for you all internally and does that create more sort of anxiety for people that we can't just wing it and yeah, I

Speaker A: wouldn't say that it creates anxiety. I think that it does raise the bar. We have to hold ourselves to a very high bar because our users hold themselves to a very high bar. Our users deliver very high, high uh, level of craft in all of the work that they do. And so we have to match that as a company.

Speaker B: And when, when you think about those, you know, different things that you mentioned, so gross marketing, performance marketing, the community building, the brand building, do you have, you know, as a cmo, do you have different measures of success for those types of investments or do you have a, um, sort of unifying framework in which you think about I'm going to shift more dollars towards this or that, um, how does that work for you?

Speaker A: I mean ultimately this, it's. We're looking at different time horizons, but everything at the end of the day has to drive the business, right? And so you have different ways that you measure things on different time horizons. So something that is on a shorter time horizon, you might look at immediate payback, you might look at even things like, you know, ltv to cac, you know, as you look across a few channels, right, that, that's a short term payback, long term payback. You're looking at awareness, sentiment, you know, market share across new audiences that you expect to expand over time. And so you, you have to have a view across both the short term and the long term to build a durable business. So we're looking across both and, and they exist on different levels with different sets of expectations. But ultimately everything drives the business totally.

Speaker B: Is there an example of a metric that's on a longer term horizon that you're looking at? Like are you doing things like awareness tracking or consideration tracking or you know, what does that look like in practice for you if you're able to share?

Speaker A: Yeah, all of those things. So we do do awareness tracking and we have both like deeper surveys that we do on a biannual basis that get very deep on likelihood to recommend and all of the, and brand love and all of the tradition kind of brand metrics perception, of course Sentiment, et cetera. But then we have a lot of regular always on pulse tracking. So how do people think about the product? How are they feeling? What's our csat? What's our mps? Even Brand love we look at on a regular kind of basis with a regular brand Pulse awareness with particular audiences. We're tracking those continuously over time. So we can actually pretty finely tune what events drive. Even those kind of longer term metrics. Are there particular things that we launch? Are there messages that we put out? Do they increase awareness with specific audiences that we're trying to target? Do they increase brand love? Do they increase the likelihood that people will recommend us to others? We try to track those things continuously so we can have a pretty good sense of what's even moving the needle in the short term, but knowing that those are longer term metrics that we want to drive.

Speaker B: Got it. Okay, that's helpful. And at your scale, I mean I would imagine that it's possible to get, you know, significant amount of data at different sort of cuts and different levels of the, of the buyer journey. Have you ever had to, so this, this is a different, you know, type of question. Have you ever had to like really fight for a specific line item or budget or a marketing experiment at Figma that you can talk about? Uh, that was maybe contentious or difficult or challenging. And, and it's okay if, if there wasn't. But I'm curious if, if that has ever happened.

Speaker A: Yeah, there. So I. Less so at Figma, but plenty of companies have had to fight a lot of battles to spend money on marketing. It's kind of the traditional fight. Right. Like I want to spend money on this thing. Okay, well what are you going to get for it? Well, I don't know until I do it how, but if we don't try, we'll never know. And so that's the constant battle that's being fought. So less so at Figma. I think there's more of an understanding, a uh, clearer understanding of how we drive the business and having purview across self serve and the sales assist business gives us so much span for impact. So you know, fewer, fewer battles I've had to fight here. But previous companies always, always, and the big one is always what's the value of brand? How do you show the value of brand? And there's one experiment that we ran, this is way back at Opendoor where we, and Opendoor was market based, so kind of lends the immediate ability to run tests. Right. And you could have control markets and you can look at the impact. So we showed the value of brand by running a brand campaign in a few markets and we had kind of control markets and we looked at market share in addition to ROI and revenue and market share doubled in three months in some of our test markets. Three months with that, in three months. It was a big campaign, to be clear, but, um, market share doubled. And that proved the case more than any test could. We had to be able to show impact quickly and we had to be able to show in a way that was incontrovertible. And so, um, that is one way that we did that. And from there it was much easier, of course, to scale that type of work. But that's always the classic debate.

Speaker B: Yeah, it happens all the time. And what's interesting about what you just said is you can actually move market share that quickly with, you know, if, if you're able to take like big swings, but if you're going to only operate at the margins, then it's very, very hard to show sort of impact in the short term. And that's a great example of that. Um, okay, talking about AI, that's the conversation that's happening around the globe in every sort of meeting, uh, I would imagine, both in the marketing domain and others. What are the two or three things that you all are doing with AI and agents in the marketing space that have really sort of helped you all, and where are things where you're like, ah, that really didn't work?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There are some clear areas where AI helps you move faster and really explore more ideas. Right. So content generation, even like the early stages of creative exploration, AI helps you kind of get explore the option space much more quickly. What we found though is that like, that doesn't always lead to the best work. Right. So once you have the expanded option space, you still have to come back and riff on ideas with a group of people to refine them and get to the best output. And so that, that collaboration and refinement and judgment process is still really important. And, and for us, you know, core team members still do that. They make the choice, the choices, they exercise the judgment to elevate their work and reach the level of craft and taste and really refinement that we require. So that's one piece. Then there's kind of the systems piece, which I'm particularly excited about. And I think AI can definitely help scale and that's where you can share out updates more broadly. You can share skills across the team so they can access information more quickly. You can have GPTs for accessing, you know, um, sales trainings, et cetera, more quickly. That is like a force multiplier that we, that we're rolling out immediately. So that's kind of how I think about it. There's kind of the, the work, the content work where AI can help you explore more ideas but humans are still needed to do the actual work and refine the work and get it to a level that meets our bar. Then there's a systems piece where. Yeah, absolutely, let's, let's get information out there as quickly as possible across people on the team and also across channels as a means to drive efficiency. Uh, and we're doing both.

Speaker B: Got it. And on that piece you also own customer support for Figma, is that right? And I imagine you're investing quite like this is what I hear from the outside in. Right. Like everyone's investing so much money in the customer experience and customer support side of things. Companies like Sierra, uh, Decagon, Fresta, uh, there's. So are you all sort of investing a lot of time and energy in that or. Yeah.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. I've kind of focused this conversation on marketing. But the support organization has completely transformed their process with some of these tools and really rethought the whole journey from you know, the initial touch points with users down through like how we help people through the lens of AI. And we've built you know, basically a chat bot that can take the first pass at answering questions but we always have people there if we're not serving people the way that we want to. And so kind of end to end the journey has been rethought with more kind of self serve information out there in our help center and then also means to kind of route customer questions to our team. But we always have people there to answer questions if, if people still need it. And that's kind of just a core value of us at Figma. And um, and that's always something that we deliver globally in, you know, in any means that the customer needs. But we've, we've been um, using tools on the team, you know, since day one. On the support side.

Speaker B: Yeah, got it. Do you feel like having customer support as part of your remit has helped elevate the conversation, the connective tissue with marketing or do you feel like that, you know. Yes, it's helpful in some ways but not really the needle mover that you would want.

Speaker A: I think it's, it's actually been critical for the end to end experience. Right. Because marketing is the first touch point and many times support is a later touch point in the journey. And so being able to look across that journey and say how are we really serving customers and users? Has been a game changer. And also part of the remit is some of the self serve teams as well. And so that for many users it's actually all the touch points outside of the product which is critical obviously in a user's kind of journey through Figma. And so having end to end visibility on that is a game changer. And ensuring that our own team is set up to deliver what users need.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Okay, uh, I'm going to put you in some tough uh, one on one sort of quick fire questions. Um, okay. ChatGPT versus Claude, both you have to give the diplomatic answer. I get it.

Speaker A: For different things. For different things.

Speaker B: Makes sense, makes sense. Um, how much of your time personally are you messing around with things like Claude code codecs, like the actual coding tools?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think maybe like 30 or 40% of time. I'm constantly trying to, I'm very much a systems thinker so I want to figure out like how are we building systems with these tools? And so, and even that's not enough. I need to be spending more time in those tools but you know, I want to get it to half, at least half of my time.

Speaker B: Wow. Wait, so you're seriously telling me that you're spending 30, 40% of your time like messing around with these?

Speaker A: Definitely. Definitely.

Speaker B: You have two, have uh, what team of like what, 200 people?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, it's bigger.

Speaker B: That's amazing.

Speaker A: But this is the future. It's completely non negotiable. You have to know the latest of uh, what's happening.

Speaker B: Okay, what advice do you have to maybe heads of marketing at earlier stage companies, folks maybe who are you know, at a series B, series C, series D type of, of environment. They're terrified of spending money on things that don't generate a click. What's your advice?

Speaker A: You know it goes back to those three areas but you, you have to place some bets early. You gotta place some bets to figure out like what's the go to market mechanism that's going to work for you. And as I mentioned earlier, not every company has everything right. It's a few things that typically work. So for Dropbox it was. Referrals were so incredibly strong and SEO was really strong. For Figma it's community and also kind of SEO geo. I know we're going to talk about that more at some point and so it's like you've got to give yourself the room to place some bets to figure out the step change that's going to drive your go to market. And um, and if you get yourself into a box of oh, I got to optimize this per click too early, you don't give yourself the room for that.

Speaker B: All right, can't agree more. What brand are you jealous of right now?

Speaker A: I've always been so I'm going to say a non tech brand because I, uh, always look to CPG brands for inspiration. I've always been impressed by Harley Davidson and the community that that company has created because it's created this band of followers that like live the brand so deeply and it represents who they are. And I think that is what you want to reach as, as a brand. It's like people identify with you, it means something that they buy your products, that they follow your company. And I think Figma has achieved that on some level in B2B in a way that I've never seen before. But I, I appreciate brands that have that level of commitment to their users.

Speaker B: Are you a user of the product or not really?

Speaker A: I'm a wannabe. I'm not cool enough is the reality. I wish I were. I really wish I were. I'm not cool enough yet. Maybe one day.

Speaker B: Maybe one day. Exactly. All right, last one. If you have the opportunity to run, uh, a, uh, marketing experiment with unlimited budget, no constraints, um, what would it be and why?

Speaker A: That's a good question. You know, I kind of feel for us, config is kind of living the dream. I mean we get to bring like tens of thousands of our community together online, hundreds of thousands of people and just talk about stuff that they care about and you know, on, on a global scale, um, activate them in a way that, you know, we think is meaningful and is meaningful to them and we bring them together for music and product, you know, knowledge and, and um, learning and to work on things together. And you know, activating that space in new ways is, is kind of like my dream. So continuing to experiment there and try new things and just, I mean, wait for the next one, we keep topping ourselves.

Speaker B: All right, config, when is the next one? What's the date?

Speaker A: June.

Speaker B: All right, so everybody who's listening in, if you're a Figma fan, go sign up for config. I'm sure the URL is figma.com config. Uh, go sign up.

Speaker A: It's June 23rd through 25th, 2026.

Speaker B: Boom.

Speaker A: Sign up.

Speaker B: All right, config that up. It sounds like Sheila, based on what I heard from you, you're already kind of doing that experiment. You have full freedom from your board and from your executive team. So it sounds like a wonderful environment to be in and no better way to kind of bring it to a close. Are you hiring? I'm imagining like you're always hiring, but are you hiring right now?

Speaker A: We're always hiring. You're always hiring on key roles. You can find it on our careers page on our site, figma.uhcomcareers we're always hiring. Looking for people who want to challenge themselves and continue raising the bar.

Speaker B: Fantastic, Sheila. Thank you so much for spending the time with me. This was fantastic. I'm looking forward to config. Maybe this time I'll try to show up and I have.

Speaker A: That'll be nice, Pranav for you to show up.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Maybe try to show up this time.

Speaker B: Who's the headline? Like, I heard, like, last time you had a. You had a whole music festival type of environment going. Is that right?

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. We're still go to the site. We're still dropping the headlines. There's a lot that's coming. I can't share some of it.

Speaker B: All right. Okay. The mystery is, uh, is is right there. Fantastic, Sheila. Thank you so much for joining me. This was fant.

Speaker A: Thanks, Pranam M. It was really fun.

Speaker B: All right, folks, that was Sheila Vashi, the CMO of Figma. I don't know about you, but I learned a ton from this episode. Tune in again next week for another great conversation. See you then.