 Hello folks. Hi, everyone. Hi, Danny. Hello, Nadia. Such a pleasure to have you. I'm so excited to be able to interview Nadia as you heard, Chief People Officer at Figma. I think that if Dylan hadn't had a great experience at Slush a few years ago being interviewed here, I would have had more difficulty convincing you to come. It's very easy. But no, it's really great to have you. And it's been such a pleasure to work with Figma for over a decade now. So, needless to say, we're not going to be talking about the great acquisition that has been announced with Adobe, which definitely made the news. But I think what it pointed out was how outstanding Figma is, and that the product, the primary product design, but now FigJam as well, that you folks have developed, is created by outstanding people. And so it is perfect to have you because you are absolutely one of the most important secret ingredients at Figma. So how many folks are you at this point? We will be almost a thousand in just a few weeks. So about 975 right now. Fantastic. And how many do you know by their name? How many do I know by name? So I started when we were about 150 people in March 2020. I think I got to about 500 or 600 before I stopped remembering everybody's name. When you look at org charts all day long and you approve every single offer that goes out the door, you get to know every single person that works at the company. So it's wonderful. Okay, so folks, I don't know if you find this quite unusual, but to know five to six hundred names of your colleagues and recognize them is not something that I hear every day. And it's truly something that many of your colleagues have noticed. So I want to get to the roots of that. And I do know that you use this superpower in previous lives. Yes. So can we talk about Starbucks? Yes. So my memory happens to be my superpower. It's also a little bit of a curse. I think my husband would wish that I didn't remember quite as much as I do. But back in college I worked at Starbucks. I was desperate to be a barista. I worked at 4.30 in the morning every day before going to school. And I really wanted to, I think this is like when I actually started building community, had regular customers every single day. I would see them pull into the parking lot. And I would try to make their drink before they even got into the store. So by the time they came to the store, they just had to pay. Their drink was ready to go. So not only did I remember all of their names, I remembered all of their beverages too. And so how did you perform from a tip standpoint? Pretty well. Starbucks has a shared tipping system, but I can say that my tips contributed heavily to the shared tipping system of the store. So clearly customer service is something you understand very well. How important is it, not particularly for your function, but when you think of the folks that you have guided into Figma, how important is that trait in people? Well, for us it's one of our values is build community. And so I think for me, from a very young age, customer service, being friendly, being open, learning from people was core to who I was. And so at Figma, it's also core to who we are, both internally building community for our figmates, but also externally with our users. We have a user base that absolutely loves us and adores us, but that we also love and adore. We listen to their feedback. We listen to what they have to say and we build for them. Similarly, internally, what our employees have to say, what our figmates have to say really helps shape the policies and processes that we make as well. Super. So if you could just walk us through what is a chief people officer and how does that relate to community? How does that relate to what you're trying to do? So what is a chief people officer? I started in this role about three months ago. So prior to this role, I was leading our recruiting team from March 2020 until about September, August. People at Figma oversees all of recruiting, all of traditional HR, so your people partners, your processes, but also overseas workplace and IT engagement. So for me, when I think about what my role is at Figma, it's how do I make working at Figma meaningful for everybody that works at the company? How do I make someone's career better? How do I make sure that they're leaving Figma better than they started and we do see people leave, not everybody stays forever, but really how do we make it meaningful for every person as a career decision? Because it is. Where you spend your career is such a big decision for people. And so one of the aspects that I've really appreciated about you is how you handle difficult decisions on people and, you know, on how Figma is in a rare situation where you're still aggressively hiring, but of course most companies out there are having to lay off a substantial amount of their folks. So how do you approach difficult conversations? How have you learned how to do that? Do you prepare the person and or do you immediately launch into difficult, what are some of the recommendations that you would have on that? It depends on the person and the situation. I wish there was a one-size-fits-all for everything, but that would that would make life too easy. I think it's really it's who are you talking to and what are you talking about? We have been very lucky that we are still hiring aggressively and we haven't had to go through layoffs, but it doesn't mean that we don't have difficult conversations around what's happening in the business. And so, you know, I approach every conversation that I have thinking about the person first and thinking about what is their biggest concern and trying to quell that and then have the conversation. But does it serve a purpose to have small talk before difficult conversations or how to yeah, just give us a sense of that because you've it depends. I'm not one for small talk usually, which is maybe a surprise as a chief people officer. I love people, but I like to get to the heart of the issue and so I think that I think it was Brené Brown who says clear is kind and so I think as you're approaching conversations that might be difficult, the sooner you can get to the point, the clearer you are, the kinder that is to the other person in the room. And when you talk about your team and all of the interviewing that they do and supporting the excess interviewing for the respective teams, how do you help them get to the heart of the matter and really understand the folks that they're interviewing? Yeah. Are there some tips there? So I will just say that is a huge shout out to our entire team. I'm the person that gets to be up here, but we cannot do this alone and our motto is always be recruiting at Figma. And so they I think the way that I think about helping them and maybe one of the tricks that people think that they should do, but maybe shouldn't is a lot of people like to ask, what do you do for fun? What do you do outside of work? And that might be a great icebreaker, but it's also a question that can really open up the conversation for a lot of bias. And so I try to steer our employees to focus on the conversation around what do they do at Figma, what excites them about working at Figma and how can this person come in and help instead of things that don't really apply to work. And when you actually get Figma, it's talking about what makes them excited to work at the company. Most of them just light up. And so that's I think the best way to connect with someone when they are interviewing with us for a role. I mean, one of the amazing things that you did, which I don't think is evident to folks is that I really first met you. Sorry, I should have offered you some water. I'm not doing a good job here. I first met you over Zoom because it was the deepest depths of COVID. And so a lot of the work that you did, including meeting all these people was was virtual, which only makes you knowing other names even more crazy. But yeah, have you incorporated the Zoom interview versus a face-to-face interview in the whole process? Were there learnings there that you folks use going forward and companies should use? Yeah. Well, when I think about, it's interesting, we went overnight from everything was in person. At Figma, we had 99% of our employees were in San Francisco, in the office five days a week. When I started two weeks after the pandemic hit, we were all virtual overnight. We had to figure out how to interview. We had to figure out how to have our company meetings. We had to figure out how to do everything. I've really seen a lot of our teams. The standard process used to be a recruiter phone call, a hiring manager phone call, and then an onsite interview where the candidate would come onsite. Now, almost all of that has actually moved to Zoom instead of a phone call. And it depends on both the candidate and the person. Zoom can be exhausting. Looking at yourself can be exhausting all day. I highly recommend hide self-view. If you have not hidden self-view yet, it helps a lot. But we've actually seen a number of our recruiters find that it's more personal. They get to knowing the candidate even better by doing that first call over Zoom instead of a phone call. Also, my team loves what's happening all of their candidates, which when I was doing this a very, very long time ago, we didn't do, but they're all texting with their candidates and trying to make everybody feel like this is casual and comfortable and that they can ask for help. Really taking down the barriers of interviewing because interviewing can be scary. That's what we've been focused on in the last couple of years. Yeah, definitely in my job. I mean, we've talked about it. I view myself as a glorified recruiter. And what we have found when interviewing founders is that the folks who can shine in this screen size is really amazing. So the folks that we've been able to interview and calibrate versus others and somehow are able to tell their story over this form factor tells you that there's something special about them. But now you have multiple offices. So you have London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco, Berlin, and not an office yet, but our first person in Singapore. Wow. So let's talk about culture and community is so essential. How have you ensured that that travels and how unique does it get to? How does it maintain its presence on a global basis, but also on a local basis? Yeah, this was one of my biggest focus areas when I started. So when I joined, we had one person in London, but we had decided to send someone from San Francisco to London to help seed that office. That was a really important decision for us. And I highly recommend that if you're opening up a global office and you've had an in-person culture before, to have your culture carriers go to your new offices. And so she went to London and helped build the team from scratch. We also had the two recruiters that were helping us build the London office come to San Francisco for a week and try to soak up as much as they could as well. And so as we've thought about building the rest of our offices in these global environments, we're probably going to do the same thing for Singapore. We hope to have a few people from our different offices go. But I just spent a few days in London with our team. And I was talking to our workplace manager and we were talking about how one of the things that she loves so much is that we have this global culture, but then she has the ability to plan things locally as well for what works for the London office. The London office is about 100 people right now. And it's very different. It's a very different culture than San Francisco, the working culture. They do a lot more of organized personal events than we might in San Francisco. Our Tokyo office is now just 16 people. As you're getting an office starting, you have to do more to build that culture and to help seed it so that they know also what are Figma's values. And so through our onboarding process, we embed the company-wide values in the company culture. But then locally we let them decide as well, what is Figma Tokyo? But it's been amazing to see that we have these both similarities across all of these regions, but also these individual cultures starting to slowly get created as well. And I would be curious to know when you joined how difficult it was to hire versus now. And the concept of an employer brand and how you worked at Quora, which had this moment of being a phenomenal brand as well. So how much do you proactively think about that? And how do you measure success on that? When I started, it's hard to imagine a time when Figma wasn't this global brand that it is today. But when I started, it wasn't. And so it was also right in the depth of early COVID. And so companies in 2020 were doing layoffs. It was not easy to recruit back then, because I think people wanted, they were seeing what was happening in the global environment. They wanted stability. We were, what, right when I joined, we raised our series D, I think, in 2020. And we weren't this super, super-known entity. But we did a pretty good job, I think, recruiting. Now we have a brand that is so much more known. But I think what's amazing about an employer brand is, one, it's tied to the overall brand. It is what is our Figma brand first and foremost. But then the employer brand is really what do your employees say about working? It's not something that you get to create and write out of thin air as a comms person. It is what does a Figma say about what it is like to work there? So I think about it a lot, because it matters to me how people describe what it is like to work at Figma. I want it to be, again, that meaningful experience. And so, you know, obviously we look at, in terms of measuring it, we look at our acceptance rates, we look at inbound traffic, how are we seeing applications go up over time? When we enter a new market in particular, it's especially important. When I think about going into Paris and Berlin, it was really hard, because our brand recognition was fairly low. So we had to build the Figma brand, and then we had to build the employer brand as well. And in many cases, like in the case of Quora or Google, the engineering culture and the engineers are placed on a pedestal in relative terms to the rest of the organization, which creates a sense of first class and second class citizens, which can actually be helpful if you're trying to build a certain type of company. That is not the case with Figma. And so is it something that you check in with and have to combat, or is it naturally not a situation where you have these different fiefdoms trying to make the importance of their group more significant? I think it's been fairly natural. And I think potentially some of it comes from the fact that we were building a tool for designers. And so how could you say that one group was more important when we were actually trying to serve this up? I wasn't there the earliest days, but that is like a hypothesis that I have. But I think we have, again, when one of your values is build community, you can't actually then put some people on a pedestal and others not. And the way that, we really, I'm a little bit cheesy as my team knows. And we talk a lot about one team, one dream. We can't do anything that we do at Figma without every single person on the team. Whether you're a designer advocate, whether you're in marketing, whether you're in finance, whether you're an engineer, the business doesn't work without all of us. And I think that community mentality has meant that we don't have these wars of we're more important, you're more important. And the other aspect is, which I respect you tremendously for, not just you, but the whole company, is you've been quite vocal on societal issues and have taken stands, for instance, with abortion and relocation. Can you talk about how to get to that decision, how to implement it, how to plan for reaction? Yeah. Well, so we have the privilege of having, I believe, today, now nine employee resource groups. And so we partner incredibly closely with our employee resource groups in a bottoms up approach, as well as a tops down approach. What is an employee resource group? An employee resource group is an employee run group. They have help of someone full time at Figma as well, focused on communities that are generally underrepresented in the technology industry. So we have our LGBTQ pride group. We have parents, which they go by second shift, which I love that name. We have our black community at Figma, women. We have our neurodiversity. So we have a number of ERGs. And they actually also help us figure out when it is that we need to take a stance. But most recently, we had a midterm election in the United States, which was just about a week ago. And we try to keep politics generally in a specific channel as an opt in. But we've also realized that so many things are about personal identity, and it's not about politics. But voting is something that I think everybody can agree on is really important and is a privilege and a right that we all have. And so for the midterm election, both Dylan and I really emphasize with the employee base, exercise your right to vote, have your voice heard. And so it's a combination of having our employees help us and having the leadership team get together and decide when it is that we want to take a stance on something. And how often do you get the pulse of what's going on? Like how do you measure how well you understand what the feeling within Figma is? Yeah. So officially, twice a year, we have an experience survey that runs a full big old survey that we send out. Then we have a pulse survey that is actually happening right now to test engagement and understand how are people feeling. But we have so many informal touch points and so many amazing through our ERGs, through our communities, different ways for Figma's to have their voice heard. We're a very transparent culture, very open, very public. Our Slack channels, which we have our AMAs, are always lively. And so we feel like we have generally a pretty good pulse on a regular basis. And what's unusual about you is that you've scaled from the... There's a lot of unusual things about me. And I'm going to get to some of them. But that you can scale from very early startup all the way to this big role. So one of the questions I was going to ask you, how would you implement this pulse? How early should... As early as possible. As early as... And how about these employee resource groups? As early as your employees have passion to do it. Community, working at a company is amazing. It's even more amazing when you have a friend or a buddy. I always... I think we know that people are generally happier at work if they have at least one friend. But if they have two, they're really, really happy. And so as early as you possibly can. Okay. So I've heard from folks in your group that there are certain times that Nadja should not be spoken to. Can we talk a bit about what that is all about? What those times might be. Well, first of all, I'm always approachable. I am always around for my team. They know where to find me and they're not shy at all. But... Big but. But big but. But if I'm a big sports fan, American... Well, some European sports, a lot of American sports, if my team is in the playoffs and if they lose a big game, I tend not to be in the best mood after. So generally, people give me a little bit of space to recover. Okay. And that last days or weeks? When I was younger, it lasted days. Yes. Now that I'm a little bit more mature and I'm growing into what it is to be an adult human being, maybe a few hours, maybe a day if it's really bad. And finally, your team for the World Cup? My team for the World Cup. I mean, I guess I have to... You don't have to say, you know... I'm rooting for Messi. Okay. I want, you know, it's his last World Cup. I would love to see him go out on top. So that's what I'm rooting for. Excellent. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you, Danny. Thank you, everyone.