Figma CEO’s path from college dropout and Thiel fellow to tech billionaire

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

The two 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 build his social network in Silicon Valley. Facebook went public in 2012, the same year that Field scored a Thiel Fellowship, which gives money “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 people have been selected since its inception in 2011.

Field, now 33, was part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a group of 20 entrepreneurs who each took home $100,000. The program doubled that sum earlier this year. Like Zuckerberg, Field came to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

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

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

“Dylan is, by far, 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 help run the fellows program as vice president for grants at the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, contrasts Field with another tech luminary.

“He’s kind of like the anti-Steve Jobs,” said Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a venture firm that prides itself on investing in dropouts. “When it comes to Jobs’ legend as this hard-charging a–hole, Dylan is the opposite.”

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

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

Figma’s IPO this week represented not only a massive valuation markup for the company but also served as a banner event for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs since the market cratered in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates.

“The most 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’re going to see all sorts 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 about the fellowship. He submitted his application two hours before the deadline, on New Year’s Eve of 2011, while he was a junior at Brown. He left out his SAT scores.

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

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

In response to a question about how he was going to change the world, Field said he was going to build better software for drones, and that he would “cofound a company with the smartest programmer I know and work on this problem.”

That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a teaching assistant for some 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 leave his academic pursuits. The pair moved into a small apartment in Palo Alto, California.

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

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

“We thought, ‘Wait, maybe there’s an opportunity here,'” Field said on a podcast earlier this year.

“What we’re trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative, by creating free, simple creative tools in the browser,” Field said in a 2012 interview for a CNBC special on the Thiel Fellowship.

In 2013, the founders started 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 failed to impress potential users. Field was micromanaging.

When Figma would show the product to companies in the Bay Area, reception wasn’t always great. Stress was building. Lilly, who ended up leading Figma’s Series A round in 2014, came to the company’s San Francisco headquarters the following August as struggles were mounting. Employees wanted changes.

“We both 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 sort of said, ‘Look, this is an impasse. You’re going to have to adapt and change.’ And he heard it and he changed. I think that’s such a great character trait of Dylan, is to hear the information, be objective about it, process it and accept it and act accordingly, if it makes sense.”

Around that time, Sho Kuwamoto joined the company. Kuwamoto brought with him experience from Macromedia and Adobe. Four 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 prominent designers.

Companies like Coda and Uber became early adopters. Some designers were excited by the idea of sharing documents by copying and pasting a URL, instead of having to deal with versions, formats and updates. Figma operated in the cloud, providing all the necessary computing infrastructure, so users didn’t need their own powerful graphics cards.

It wasn’t until September 2016 that Figma made the design editor available for free to the general public and made it possible for multiple designers to make changes in a single file simultaneously. That became the killer feature.

The software started gaining traction inside Microsoft. But there was an issue. Microsoft feared that Figma’s lack of a clear business model might lead to a burial in the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design executive at the software giant, visited Figma’s headquarters to deliver the message, Field told CNBC in 2022.

“Look, we’re all worried you’re going to die as a company,” Field recalled Friedman telling him.

The following year, Figma introduced its first paid tier.

By the time venture stalwart Sequoia Capital came on board in 2019, Figma was a hot commodity, raising its Series C round at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed said some of his firm’s portfolio companies had started migrating to Figma, and founders were using it for pitch decks.

“Companies often will show prototypes in board meetings of new products they want to build, and so the first thing we saw a lot of Figma links for was that,” Reed said in an interview this week.

“It was a very easy investment,” Reed said. “We went through some of our old investment voting data. I think Figma might have been the highest vote we ever had for an investment.”

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

Financial analysts covering Adobe started 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 status reserved for startups worth at least $1 billion. Field told Forbes that some job candidates were hesitant to join because of the modest valuation. In 2020, the company raised a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.

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

“We asked ourselves: how can we help teams connect, have fun and enter a flow state during 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 about a partnership or acquisition, but Field chose to stay the course. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Field about a possible deal in early 2021, but again the Figma CEO demurred, opting to raise a round at a $10 billion valuation.

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

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

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

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

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

“Look, when we did the deal with Adobe in the first place, my head space in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. This is clearly exponential as a technology. I don’t know what this does to us. Is 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 year. “And I was like, it’s better to team up in this world with Adobe and to navigate this together and to figure this out together than it is to go it alone.”

In September 2022, Adobe agreed to buy Figma for about $20 billion, announcing that Field would remain in charge of his part of the business and would report to Wadhwani.

“Adobe has a unique 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 accelerate this new vision, delivering great value to our customers and shareholders.”

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

“We’re worried this deal could stifle innovation and lead to higher costs for companies that rely on Figma and Adobe’s digital tools — as they cease to compete to provide customers with new and better products,” Sorcha O’Carroll, an official at the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, said in a press release in mid-2023.

Around that time, Field announced another step toward product diversification by introducing Dev Mode, which turns Figma designs into source code that can serve as a starting point for software developers. The reveal came 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 company and engaging with regulators. Adobe had said it expected to complete the deal in 2023, but time was running out. Regulators were proposing remedies that the parties didn’t like.

“Even toward the final months, there were these moments of, ‘Oh, this is going to go through,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Field told The Verge. “And obviously at the end, there’s 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 able to complete this,” Field told The New 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 whole ordeal was having an impact.

“You could 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 company’s ability to sell more to existing customers, slid from 159% in the first quarter of 2023 to 122% by the end of the year, according to Figma’s IPO prospectus. Figma chalked it up to a tough comparison from the year before, thanks to the launch of FigJam, and economic uncertainty that caused some clients to reduce seat counts. The retention rate bounced back to 132% in the first quarter of 2025.

During the 2023 winter holidays, Field considered ways to rally the workforce. After the new year, he announced internally that Figma would give extra equity to employees who joined or received promotions following the acquisition announcement, because the valuation was going back down to $10 billion. He said any employees who wished to leave 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 crowd through a slew of new products, including Figma Make, which draws on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a large language model from AI startup Anthropic.

“With Figma Make, you could take an existing design and prompt your way to a fully coded prototype,” Field said.

A product manager, Holly Li, came up for a demo. At a laptop, she copied the design for a music player in the Figma editor and pasted it 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 of difficulty, but that’s okay,” she said. The cloudy background image from the original design was gone, and track names became difficult to read. The crowd was silent. She brought up a working version in a different browser tab.

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

Other products 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 some of the offerings from other companies look more impressive.

Andrew Chan, a former Figma software engineer, wrote in a blog post last year that “an interesting and ongoing question is whether 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 appeared to be at an earlier stage.

It’s the sort of feedback that Field will read and send to his employees, known as Figmates. He reads support tickets and mentions of Figma’s name on X, formerly Twitter. He took no time off to address 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 way to take a Figma Make design and bring it into the main design editor.

“Hi Yianni, we are working towards this and very excited about what it will unlock!” Field replied. “Please keep the Make feedback coming!”

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