At Intervue, we study how legendary companies make their earliest hiring decisions. Because if there’s one pattern we’ve seen across industries, it’s this: the first 10 hires determine whether a company becomes a market leader or a forgotten experiment.

Few case studies illustrate this better than Figma. Today, Figma powers millions of designers and engineers worldwide. But its success wasn’t inevitable. It was built on a founding philosophy that broke with industry norms: hire designers who code, engineers who sketch.

Dylan Field’s path to Figma didn’t follow a straight line. In his episode of How I Built This with Guy Raz, he recalls his childhood in Sonoma County where he dabbled in acting even appearing in a Windows XP commercial. Later, in middle school, he sought out intellectual companionship not in classrooms, but from a janitor fascinated by math and physics who nudged him into proofs and set theory.

Those anecdotes might seem far removed from startup life, but they reveal a pattern. Dylan had an instinct for finding teachers in unusual places, for learning across boundaries. That same instinct guided his approach to building teams at Figma.

In 2012, he was awarded a Thiel Fellowship after submitting an application that included an essay titled “Chocolate is repulsive.” It was deliberately contrarian, playful but thoughtful, the sort of signal that catches evaluators’ attention. And it set Dylan on the path to drop out of Brown University and co-found Figma with Evan Wallace, a fellow Brown alumnus and graphics expert.

When Dylan and Evan first explored what to build, they briefly toyed with creating a meme generator using WebGL. Dylan later called this “the darkest week of Figma.” It lasted five days before they scrapped the idea and refocused on design tools.

It’s tempting to laugh at the detour, but there’s a deeper lesson: adaptability is the defining trait of founding teams. What separates resilient startups from stalled ones isn’t perfect clarity, it’s the ability to abandon dead ends quickly. That requires hiring people comfortable with ambiguity, who can contribute beyond rigid job descriptions.

At Intervue, we consistently see this in our clients’ journeys: the best early hires aren’t those who only excel in narrow specialties, but those who can pivot when the playbook changes.

From the beginning, Figma’s founding team rejected the traditional separation between design and engineering. Instead of building silos, they built overlap.

• Designers were expected to understand technical constraints.
• Engineers were expected to care about visual polish and usability.
• Everyone was expected to engage in critique, debate tradeoffs, and own the product experience end to end.

This philosophy gave Figma three compounding advantages:

1. Faster iteration, because design decisions didn’t stall on technical feasibility.
2. Higher product polish, because engineers took pride in user experience.
3. Fewer handoff bottlenecks, because collaboration was built into the team structure.

By the time Figma launched publicly in 2016, years after its founding, the product already felt remarkably cohesive. That polish was not luck — it was the direct result of hybrid hiring.

None of this was without difficulty. Dylan has admitted that as a 20-year-old CEO, he struggled with micromanagement. He wanted control over every detail, which nearly broke the team.

The turning point came when John Lilly, former Mozilla CEO and one of Dylan’s mentors, intervened. Lilly reassured employees, helped Dylan recalibrate, and ultimately saved the young team from burnout.

This illustrates another hiring truth we emphasize at Intervue: it’s not enough to hire great individuals. Founders must also grow into leaders who can retain them. The wrong leadership style at the wrong moment can undo even the strongest early team.

In his How I Built This interview, Dylan reflects on how much of Figma’s success was about timing: if they had started a few years earlier, WebGL wouldn’t have been ready. A few years later, someone else might have claimed the space. But timing alone doesn’t explain the outcome.

What mattered just as much was the people. Meeting Evan Wallace at Brown, attracting early employees who could thrive in hybrid roles, and learning from mentors like John Lilly gave Figma the resilience to endure years of stealth before launch.

Figma’s hiring story is not just history. It’s a playbook for anyone building a startup team today:

• Hire for overlap, not silos. Your first hires should collapse boundaries, not enforce them.
• Value adaptability over certainty. Teams that survive early chaos are those comfortable with pivots.
• Structure your hiring. Even Figma stumbled until they systematized interviews and feedback.
• Invest in leadership growth. A strong team cannot survive weak management.

At Intervue, we help companies operationalize these lessons — building interview processes that identify mindset as well as skill, structuring rubrics to minimize bias, and sourcing hybrid talent that can accelerate product-market fit.

The “designers who code, engineers who sketch” mindset isn’t just Figma’s origin story. It’s a competitive edge that every company can adopt. In a world where speed, polish, and collaboration make or break product adoption, hiring hybrids is no longer optional.

Figma’s founding team understood this before the market did. That’s why they outpaced incumbents and became the standard. The question is: will your team do the same, or will you get left behind by those who embrace the overlap?

At Intervue, we believe the answer lies in how you hire.