Figma CEO’s trail from university dropout and Thiel fellow to tech billionaire

Mark Zuckerberg could also be probably the most well-known college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Garden is the actual, then his design startup Figma soared in its keep marketplace debut this presen.

The 2 marketers have one thing else in ordinary: similar ties to Peter Thiel.

Zuckerberg were given his first outdoor test for Fb from Thiel in 2004, quickly earlier than retirement Harvard College to assemble his social community in Silicon Valley. Fb went crowd in 2012, the similar occasion that Garden scored a Thiel Fellowship, which supplies cash “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 crowd were selected since its inception in 2011.

Garden, now 33, used to be a part of the second one bundle of Thiel fellows, a gaggle of 20 marketers who every took house $100,000. This system doubled that sum previous this occasion. Like Zuckerberg, Garden got here to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a part years at Brown College in Windfall, Rhode Island.

On Thursday, Figma’s keep value greater than tripled in its first moment of buying and selling at the Pristine York Secure Change. It rose once more on Friday, wrapping up the presen with a completely diluted marketplace cap above $71 billion. Garden’s stake is usefulness about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, in the meantime, is now the sector’s third-richest particular person, with a internet usefulness of over $260 billion.

Time the contours of Garden’s tale might pitch habitual, he’s an excessively other more or less persona.

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

Mike Gibson, who old to aid run the guys program as vice chairman for grants on the nonprofit Thiel Understructure, contrasts Garden with every other tech luminary.

“He’s kind of like the anti-Steve Jobs,” mentioned Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Charity, a challenge company that prides itself on making an investment 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 then one semester, died of most cancers in 2011, as his corporate used to be on its solution to turning into probably the most reliable industry on the earth.

Garden used to be all set to formally input the billionaire ranks nearly 3 years in the past. With Figma having emerged as a pacesetter in web-based equipment for designing apps and internet sites, Adobe affirmative to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. However regulators within the U.Okay. mentioned the tie-up would’ve harm pageant, and the firms scrapped the transaction in overdue 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup charge.

Figma’s IPO this presen represented no longer just a immense valuation markup for the corporate but additionally served as a banner match for Silicon Valley, which has not hidden a shortage of high-profile IPOs because the marketplace cratered in early 2022 because of hovering inflation and emerging rates of interest.

“The most important thing to remind myself of, the team of, is share price is a moment in time,” Garden informed CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “We’re going to see all sorts of behavior probably today, over the weeks ahead.”

Figma declined to manufacture Garden to be had for an interview for this tale.

Garden’s trek again to the Bay Segment, the place he’d grown up, started with a TechCrunch article in regards to the fellowship. He submitted his software two hours earlier than the cut-off date, on Pristine While’s Eve of 2011, past he used to be a young at Brown. He disregarded his SAT rankings.

“It is my belief that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and can easily be gamed,” he wrote in his software, which he posted on LinkedIn years upcoming. Within the essay division, he used to be requested to do business in a extremely arguable tug.

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

Based on a query about how he used to be going to modify the sector, Garden mentioned he used to be taking to assemble higher device for drones, and that he would “cofound a company with the smartest programmer I know and work on this problem.”

That co-founder used to be Evan Wallace, who have been a educating associate for a few of Garden’s classes at Brown. Wallace used to be technologically talented, incomes the nickname “computer Jesus,” or CJ. However he used to be already 20, which means he used to be too worn to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship.

Garden scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to reduce his educational interests. The pair moved right into a mini rental in Palo Alto, California.

The drone device plan had long gone out the window. Wallace sought after to build one thing homogeneous to WebGL, a graphics rendering gadget for information superhighway browsers. A occasion upcoming, they had been appearing traders a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the motion of a ball in a lake of aqua.

The unmistakable aggressive goal used to be Adobe, which used to be ending development of Fireworks, an app design product that it got with the 2005 Macromedia acquire.

“We thought, ‘Wait, maybe there’s an opportunity here,'” Garden said on a podcast previous this occasion.

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

In 2013, the founders began speaking with traders about elevating a seed spherical. Garden confirmed the lake aqua demo to John Lilly of Greylock Companions at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had up to now been CEO of Mozilla, the place an engineer evolved device that resulted in WebGL. He used to be inspired with what he used to be ocular, however he didn’t assume it had a lot financial possible.

Figma took on seed investment from Index Ventures and alternative traders. The founders assembled a mini team of workers at an place of business in Palo Alto. Travel used to be slow. Early variations of the product failed to provoke possible customers. Garden used to be micromanaging.

When Figma would display the product to corporations within the Bay Segment, reception wasn’t at all times stunning. Tension used to be construction. Lilly, who ended up important Figma’s Order A spherical in 2014, got here to the corporate’s San Francisco headquarters refer to August as struggles had been mounting. Workers sought after adjustments.

“We both heard it,” mentioned Danny Rimer, the Index spouse who led the seed investment, relating to conversations he and Lilly had been having with staffers about Garden.

“We sat down with him and explained to him the situation,” Rimer mentioned. “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.”

Round that day, Sho Kuwamoto joined the corporate. Kuwamoto introduced with him revel in from Macromedia and Adobe. 4 months upcoming, Figma introduced its debut product in a separate preview.

Garden were given concerned with customers. He replied to crowd on social media who had been posting about Figma, telling them they had been receiving get admission to to the preview. He additionally sought out designers.

Firms like Coda and Uber turned into early adopters. Some designers had been focused on the theory of sharing paperwork through copying and pasting a URL, in lieu of getting to trade in with variations, codecs and updates. Figma operated within the cloud, offering all of the important computing infrastructure, so customers didn’t want their very own tough graphics playing cards.

It wasn’t till September 2016 that Figma made the design essayist to be had for separate to the overall crowd and made it conceivable for more than one designers to manufacture adjustments in one report concurrently. That turned into the killer attribute.

The device began gaining traction within Microsoft. However there used to be a subject. Microsoft feared that Figma’s inadequency of a sunny industry fashion may govern to a burial within the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design government on the device vast, visited Figma’s headquarters to bring the message, Garden informed CNBC in 2022.

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

Refer to occasion, Figma offered its first paid tier.

Through the day challenge stalwart Sequoia Capital came on board in 2019, Figma used to be a scorching commodity, elevating its Order C spherical at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia spouse Andrew Reed mentioned a few of his company’s portfolio corporations had began migrating to Figma, and founders had been the usage of it for tone 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 mentioned in an interview this presen.

“It was a very easy investment,” Reed mentioned. “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 in depth roster of winners over the many years contains Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Zoom and WhatsApp.

Monetary analysts overlaying Adobe began asking about Figma. Adobe, which had discharged the XD app for consumer revel in design, answered, 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 investment spherical from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.

Next got here Covid. Workplaces closed. The arena went far flung in a single day. Figma’s collaboration capacity abruptly turned into vital to the way in which many extra crowd labored.

“We asked ourselves: how can we help teams connect, have fun and enter a flow state during the earliest stages of the design process?” Garden upcoming wrote on Twitter.

The outcome used to be FigJam, a virtual whiteboard that turned into Figma’s 2d product, and represented a key step towards diversification.

The Adobe noise persisted to get louder. In 2020, Garden had discussions with Adobe government Scott Belsky a few partnership or acquisition, however Garden selected to stick the direction. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Garden a few conceivable trade in in early 2021, however once more the Figma CEO demurred, opting to lift a round at a $10 billion valuation.

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

The circumstance briefly modified. Through early 2022, with the Fed lifting rates of interest to battle inflation, traders had been promoting out of high-growth tech and rotating into companies with predictable earnings. Sequoia used to be encouraging its startups to leave prices.

Belsky once more approached Garden in April of that occasion, this day along David Wadhwani, who used to be important Adobe’s virtual media industry.

“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 said in a regulatory filing.

Garden used to be making an allowance for the results of the get up of synthetic wisdom.

“Look, when we did the deal with Adobe in the first place, my head space in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. That is obviously exponential as a generation. I don’t know what this does to us. Is that this one-tenth our marketplace, is it 10x our marketplace? What does it ruthless for creatives and architects?” Garden mentioned in an interview with The Verge ultimate occasion. “And I used to be like, it’s higher to workforce up on this global with Adobe and to navigate this in combination and to determine this out in combination than it’s to move it by myself.”

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 singular alternative to bring in a global of collaborative creativity,” Narayen told analysts on a conference call the day of the agreement. “In my conversations with Dylan at Figma, it turned into abundantly sunny that in combination lets boost up this pristine visual, handing over stunning price to our shoppers 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 anxious this trade in may impede innovation and govern to better prices for firms that depend on Figma and Adobe’s virtual equipment — as they stop to compete to handover shoppers with pristine and higher merchandise,” 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 towards the general months, there have been those moments of, ‘Oh, that is taking to move thru,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Field told The Verge. “And clearly on the finish, there’s a mutual working out of,’ This choice has been made for us and let’s name 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 irritating and unhappy that we’re no longer in a position to finish 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.

“It’s essential see it in his face,” Mehrotra said of Field, adding that he was relieved when he learned Figma would remain independent. “He used to be growing old proper in entrance people.”

In Might, Garden took the stage at Figma’s consumer convention earlier than 8,500 attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Heart, dressed in a dark “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 Build, you’ll want to tug an current design and steered your solution to a completely 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.

“Ok. This day, the fashion had a modest little bit of problem, however that’s ok,” 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 “totally, totally 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 “a fascinating and ongoing query is whether or not Figma can repeat the good fortune it had in design with alternative merchandise.”

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.

“Hello Yianni, we’re operating in opposition to this and really fascinated about what it’ll release!” Garden replied. “Please conserve the Build comments coming!”

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