Figma CEO Dylan Field’s path from college dropout to billionaire

Mark Zuckerberg often is the most famous college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Field is the most recent, after his design startup Figma soared in its stock market debut this week.

The 2 entrepreneurs have something else in common: close ties to Peter Thiel.

Zuckerberg got his first outside check for Facebook from Thiel in 2004, soon before leaving Harvard University to construct his social network in Silicon Valley. Facebook went public in 2012, the identical 12 months that Field scored a Thiel Fellowship, which supplies money “to young individuals who wish to construct latest things as a substitute of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 people have been chosen since its inception in 2011.

Field, now 33, was a part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a bunch of 20 entrepreneurs who each took home $100,000. This system doubled that sum earlier this 12 months. Like Zuckerberg, Field got here to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown University in Windfall, Rhode Island.

On Thursday, Figma’s stock price greater than tripled in its first day of trading on the Latest York Stock Exchange. It rose again on Friday, wrapping up the week with a totally diluted market cap above $71 billion. Field’s stake is value about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is now the world’s third-richest person, with a net value of over $260 billion.

While the contours of Field’s story may sound familiar, he’s a really different form of character.

“Dylan is, by far, essentially the most humble billionaire I’ve ever met,” said Joshua Browder, CEO of legal services startup DoNotPay and a former Thiel fellow.

Mike Gibson, who used to assist run the fellows program as vp for grants on the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, contrasts Field with one other tech luminary.

“He’s form of just like the anti-Steve Jobs,” said Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a enterprise firm that prides itself on investing in dropouts. “In the case of Jobs’ legend as this hard-charging a–hole, Dylan is the other.”

The Apple co-founder, who dropped out of college after one semester, died of cancer in 2011, as his company was on its method to becoming the most beneficial business on this planet.

Field was poised to officially enter the billionaire ranks almost three years ago. With Figma having emerged as a pacesetter in web-based tools for designing apps and web sites, Adobe agreed to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. But regulators within the U.K. said the tie-up would’ve hurt competition, and the businesses scrapped the transaction in late 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.

Figma’s IPO this week represented not only an enormous valuation markup for the corporate but in addition served as a banner event for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs for the reason that market cratered in early 2022 resulting from soaring inflation and rising rates of interest.

“An important thing to remind myself of, the team of, is share price is a moment in time,” Field told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “We’ll see all styles of behavior probably today, over the weeks ahead.”

Figma declined to make Field available for an interview for this story.

Field’s trek back to the Bay Area, where he’d grown up, began with a TechCrunch article concerning the fellowship. He submitted his application two hours before the deadline, on Latest Yr’s Eve of 2011, while he was a junior at Brown. He overlooked his SAT scores.

“It’s my belief that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and may easily be gamed,” he wrote in his application, which he posted on LinkedIn years later. Within the essay section, he was asked to supply a highly controversial take.

“Chocolate is repulsive,” he wrote. “Even the smell of it makes me wish to vomit.” 

In response to an issue about how he was going to vary the world, Field said he was going to construct higher software for drones, and that he would “cofound an organization with the neatest programmer I do know and work on this problem.”

That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a teaching assistant for a few of Field’s courses at Brown. Wallace was technologically gifted, earning the nickname “computer Jesus,” or CJ. But he was already 20, meaning he was too old to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship.

Field scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to go away his academic pursuits. The pair moved right into a small apartment in Palo Alto, California.

The drone software plan had gone out the window. Wallace desired to develop something related to WebGL, a graphics rendering system for web browsers. A 12 months later, they were showing investors a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the movement of a ball in a pool of water.

The apparent competitive goal was Adobe, which was ending development of Fireworks, an app design product that it acquired with the 2005 Macromedia purchase.

“We thought, ‘Wait, possibly there’s a possibility here,'” Field said on a podcast earlier this 12 months.

“What we’re attempting to do is make it in order that anyone may be creative, by creating free, easy creative tools within the browser,” Field said in a 2012 interview for a CNBC special on the Thiel Fellowship.

In 2013, the founders began talking with investors about raising a seed round. Field showed the pool water demo to John Lilly of Greylock Partners at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had previously been CEO of Mozilla, where an engineer developed software that led to WebGL. He was impressed with what he was seeing, but he didn’t think it had much economic potential.

Figma took on seed funding from Index Ventures and other investors. The founders assembled a small group of employees at an office in Palo Alto. Progress was slow. Early versions of the product didn’t impress potential users. Field was micromanaging.

When Figma would show the product to corporations within the Bay Area, reception wasn’t at all times great. Stress was constructing. Lilly, who ended up leading Figma’s Series A round in 2014, got here to the corporate’s San Francisco headquarters the next August as struggles were mounting. Employees wanted changes.

“We each heard it,” said Danny Rimer, the Index partner who led the seed funding, referring to conversations he and Lilly were having with staffers about Field.

“We sat down with him and explained to him the situation,” Rimer said. “We heard it and we form of said, ‘Look, that is an impasse. You are going to must adapt and alter.’ And he heard it and he modified. I believe that is such an amazing character trait of Dylan, is to listen to the knowledge, be objective about it, process it and accept it and act accordingly, if it is smart.”

Around that point, Sho Kuwamoto joined the corporate. Kuwamoto brought with him experience from Macromedia and Adobe. 4 months later, Figma launched its debut product in a free preview.

Field got involved with users. He replied to people on social media who were posting about Figma, telling them they were receiving access to the preview. He also sought out distinguished designers.

Firms like Coda and Uber became early adopters. Some designers were excited by the thought of sharing documents by copying and pasting a URL, as a substitute of getting to take care of versions, formats and updates. Figma operated within the cloud, providing all of the vital computing infrastructure, so users didn’t need their very own powerful graphics cards.

It wasn’t until September 2016 that Figma made the design editor available at no cost to most people and made it possible for multiple designers to make changes in a single file concurrently. That became the killer feature.

The software began gaining traction inside Microsoft. But there was a problem. Microsoft feared that Figma’s lack of a transparent business model might result in a burial within the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design executive on the software giant, visited Figma’s headquarters to deliver the message, Field told CNBC in 2022.

“Look, we’re all frightened you are going to die as an organization,” Field recalled Friedman telling him.

The next 12 months, Figma introduced its first paid tier.

By the point enterprise stalwart Sequoia Capital got here on board in 2019, Figma was a hot commodity, raising its Series C round at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed said a few of his firm’s portfolio corporations had began migrating to Figma, and founders were using it for pitch decks.

“Firms often will show prototypes in board meetings of latest products they wish to construct, and so the very first thing we saw plenty of Figma links for was that,” Reed said in an interview this week.

“It was a very simple investment,” Reed said. “We went through a few of our old investment voting data. I believe Figma might need been the very best vote we ever had for an investment.”

Sequoia’s extensive roster of winners over the a long time includes Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Zoom and WhatsApp.

Financial analysts covering Adobe began asking about Figma. Adobe, which had released the XD app for user experience design, responded, adding the startup to its official list of competitors.

But Adobe’s market capitalization sat above $170 billion, and Figma wasn’t even a “unicorn,” a standing reserved for startups value at the least $1 billion. Field told Forbes that some job candidates were hesitant to affix due to modest valuation. In 2020, the corporate raised a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.

Then got here Covid. Offices closed. The world went distant overnight. Figma’s collaboration capability suddenly became critical to the best way many more people worked.

“We asked ourselves: how can we help teams connect, rejoice and enter a flow state in the course of the earliest stages of the design process?” Field later wrote on Twitter.

The result was FigJam, a digital whiteboard that became Figma’s second product, and represented a key step toward diversification.

The Adobe noise continued to get louder. In 2020, Field had discussions with Adobe executive Scott Belsky a couple of partnership or acquisition, but Field selected to remain the course. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Field a couple of possible deal in early 2021, but again the Figma CEO demurred, opting to lift a round at a $10 billion valuation.

“Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe,” Field wrote in a 2021 tweet.

The environment quickly modified. By early 2022, with the Fed lifting rates of interest to fight inflation, investors were selling out of high-growth tech and rotating into businesses with predictable profits. Sequoia was encouraging its startups to scale back costs.

Belsky again approached Field in April of that 12 months, this time alongside David Wadhwani, who was leading Adobe’s digital media business.

“Mr. Field expressed openness to understanding the terms of a possible acquisition of Figma by Adobe, and Mr. Field, Mr. Belsky and Mr. Wadhwani continued their discussion of the potential advantages of a mixture the next week,” Adobe stated in a regulatory filing.

Field was considering the implications of the rise of artificial intelligence.

“Look, once we did the take care of Adobe in the primary place, my head space in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. That is clearly exponential as a technology. I do not know what this does to us. Is that this one-tenth our market, is it 10x our market? What does it mean for creatives and designers?” Field said in an interview with The Verge last 12 months. “And I used to be like, it’s higher to team up on this world with Adobe and to navigate this together and to figure this out together than it’s to go it alone.”

In September 2022, Adobe agreed to purchase Figma for about $20 billion, announcing that Field would remain accountable for his a part of the business and would report back to Wadhwani.

“Adobe has a novel opportunity to usher in a world of collaborative creativity,” Narayen told analysts on a conference call the day of the agreement. “In my conversations with Dylan at Figma, it became abundantly clear that together we could speed up this latest vision, delivering great value to our customers and shareholders.”

That chance never got here. An intensifying regulatory environment within the U.S. and Europe had made sizable tech deals more burdensome. Adobe was suddenly within the crosshairs, and the transaction was hitting repeated hurdles.

“We’re frightened this deal could stifle innovation and result in higher costs for corporations that depend on Figma and Adobe’s digital tools — as they stop to compete to offer customers with latest and higher products,” Sorcha O’Carroll, an official on the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, said in a press release in mid-2023.

Around that point, Field announced one other step toward product diversification by introducing Dev Mode, which turns Figma designs into source code that may function a place to begin for software developers. The reveal got here at Figma’s Config user conference in San Francisco, which attracted 8,000 attendees.

The U.K.’s investigation dragged on for months. Field was pulling double duty running the corporate and fascinating with regulators. Adobe had said it expected to finish the deal in 2023, but time was running out. Regulators were proposing remedies that the parties didn’t like.

“Even toward the ultimate months, there have been these moments of, ‘Oh, that is going to undergo,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Field told The Verge. “And clearly at the tip, there is a mutual understanding of,’ This decision has been made for us and let’s call it.'”

On a Sunday in December 2023, Field gathered board members for a 10-minute call, informing them that the deal was off. The official statement followed early on Monday morning.

“It’s frustrating and sad that we’re not capable of complete this,” Field told The Latest York Times.

Not everyone in Field’s orbit saw it that way. Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra, a friend of Field’s and longtime Figma user, said the entire ordeal was having an impact.

“You may see it in his face,” Mehrotra said of Field, adding that he was relieved when he learned Figma would remain independent. “He was getting older right in front of us.”

But Figma had some business concerns. Its net dollar retention rate, a measurement of the corporate’s ability to sell more to existing customers, slid from 159% in the primary quarter of 2023 to 122% by the tip of the 12 months, in response to Figma’s IPO prospectus. Figma chalked it as much as a troublesome comparison from the 12 months before, due to the launch of FigJam, and economic uncertainty that caused some clients to scale back seat counts. The retention rate bounced back to 132% in the primary quarter of 2025.

In the course of the 2023 winter holidays, Field considered ways to rally the workforce. After the brand new 12 months, he announced internally that Figma would give extra equity to employees who joined or received promotions following the acquisition announcement, since the valuation was going back right down to $10 billion. He said any employees who wished to go away would get three months of severance, with no hard feelings.

Fewer than 5% of staffers took him up on the offer.

In May, Field took the stage at Figma’s user conference before 8,500 attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wearing a black “Config 2025” T-shirt. He walked the group through a slew of latest products, including Figma Make, which pulls on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a big language model from AI startup Anthropic.

“With Figma Make, you can take an existing design and prompt your method to a totally coded prototype,” Field said.

A product manager, Holly Li, got here up for a demo. At a laptop, she copied the design for a music player within the Figma editor and pasted it right into a chat box, typing instructions to rotate the album art like a record while a song is playing. She showed apps created with Figma Make, eliciting some cheers, and returned to the demo.

“Okay. This time, the model had a little bit little bit of difficulty, but that is okay,” she said. The cloudy background image from the unique design was gone, and track names became difficult to read. The group was silent. She brought up a working version in a unique browser tab.

The feature went live last week. Mehrotra said it’s off to a very good start.

Other products available in the market were built with generative AI in mind. They include Lovable, Miro’s Uizard and Vercel’s v0. Brent Stewart, an analyst at Gartner, said that Figma is “utterly, utterly dominant” in design but that a number of the offerings from other corporations look more impressive.

Andrew Chan, a former Figma software engineer, wrote in a blog post last 12 months that “an interesting and ongoing query is whether or not Figma can repeat the success it had in design with other products.”

Nadia Eldeib, a former Lyft product manager and CEO of startup CodeYam, tried Figma Make before the broad launch and put it up against Lovable and v0. Writing on Substack, she said it gave the impression to be at an earlier stage.

It is the form of feedback that Field will read and send to his employees, referred to as Figmates. He reads support tickets and mentions of Figma’s name on X, formerly Twitter. He took no day off to handle such matters on the very day that his company was conducting its IPO, ultimately pricing shares $1 above the expected range.

Yianni Mathioudakis, a creative director in Maryland, tagged Figma in a post on Wednesday, asking if anyone had found a method to take a Figma Make design and produce it into the essential design editor.

“Hi Yianni, we’re working towards this and really enthusiastic about what it can unlock!” Field replied. “Please keep the Make feedback coming!”

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