Inside Dylan Field’s Big IPO—and His Even Bigger Plans for Figma
When Dylan Field Appears on my zoom screen, his face is a mixture of vertigo and fatigue. He is back to work, after a swirling trip to New York where he launched his company FIMMA on the New York Stock Exchange, cutting the trend of startups of several billion dollars remaining private. Even before it became clear that this could be the craziest public launch for years, the Figma World – Fans of the Application, the employees (known as Figmates) and the investors – had already transformed Wall Street into a block party, distributing a swag, serving free pizza and exploding music from a DJ that shook the cave of mammon. But the sweetest music took place on the large board, while the opening course of $ 33 is skyrocketing at $ 142 before settling at comfortable $ 90.
As the land returned to California, it was worth more than $ 5 billion. But he doesn’t want to talk about it. History, in its mind, does not concern a company that makes it public, but the IPO of the design itself. “What is most important to me is what our product will be in 5 years, 10 years,” he says. “Have we progressed the design forward?”
Not focusing on money is probably a good idea. The day we speak, Figma’s equity price dropped by 27%, reducing its evaluation by around 60 billion dollars to just over $ 40 billion. It is even much higher than anyone waiting. Although the IPO of Figma celebrates design, it is not the only company hoping to revolutionize the field. AI will launch a new era in the design. Figma, like his competitors, will be defined by the way he manages this technology. In the end, it is still not clear if AI will help its business or will explode it.
Field work
Whenever I speak to Field, it seems that something monumental happens to Figma, the company he co -founded as a 19 -year -old Thiel scholarship holder and dropout from Brown University. From the start, the Figma browser -based application allowed people to collaborate and think about online design. He grew up a faithful audience, threatening the giant in design tools, Adobe. During our first meeting in 2022, I pressed Field on this David and Goliath Trope – and if he could draw an Instagram and sell to a larger company. Field nobly talked about the way he was in the long term. In fact, he had a secret that he could not share: Adobe had just offered $ 20 billion for his business, and he was going to take it. The news broke out weeks after our conversation. When I faced this at the wired conference in San Francisco last December, he apologized. “I felt so bad about it,” he told me.
The next time we spoke, in December 2023, this agreement had just collapsed because the Ministry of Justice of former President Joe Biden said that he would oppose the merger. Field has been clearly shaken but determined to continue its original plan to create a business that would change the way people create applications, websites, documents and decks. It was not easy because months of momentum had been wasted by preparing to merge with the largest company.
Over the next two years, Figma has expanded its offers and continued to win fans. Its 13 million users only alludes to its ubiquity: the work produced on its application is seen by billions of people. Among fortune companies 500, 95% use the product. Figma turns a profit. And post-OPO, even after its actions have exceeded, the company is worth more than twice what Adobe was going to pay for it.
However, I was a little disconcerted by the fact that Field judged necessary for the IPO when startups today can achieve stratospheric assessments without the Mishigas of responsibility which has just become a public enterprise. Field cites the virtues of community property, the company’s hygiene to follow the rules of report, and how the option of purchasing Figma shares will lead people to better understand his business. In the end, he said, “If you will finally become a public, why not do it now?”
Design or lose
As it is the custom for many technological leaders in public, Field has written a letter of founder in the prospectus in which he promised higher values than profits. (These wishes generally end up haunting their authors while disjointed entrepreneurs are transformed into fire to yacht.) Essentially, the letter is an argument that the design now has a central place in people’s lives. It is not only an important factor in the way people build products and are expressed: it is THE postman. “Design,” he wrote, “is larger than design”. When I ask what he meant by that, he does not too easily unpack the Koan. “This is something that can mean a lot,” he says. “It is the rise in power of the design that goes from crafts of pixel to solving more general problems, to the way you win or lose.”
He explains that in the early 2000s, design was to make things pretty. In the 2010s, people moved Steve Jobs’s philosophy that conception was a question of function. Now, says Field, design is not only these two things, but our means of communication – which you are, what your brand represents, how you engage with the public. Our world is built on software, says Field, the more software, the more the design becomes the main differentiator. This is our new language, and Figma wants to be the Duolingo for those who strive to master it.
