Inside Dylan Field’s Big IPO—and His Even Bigger Plans for Figma

When Dylan Field My zoom is popped up on the screen, his face is a mixture of guida and fatigue. After a cyclone travel in New York City, he returned to the workplace where he launched his company Figma on the New York Stock Exchange, the tendency to stay in private dollar startups. Even before it becomes clear that it can be the wildest public launch of the year, the Figma World App application fan, employees (known as Figarates) and investors have already turned Wall Street to a block party, transferred swag, served free pizza, serving free pizza, and from one DJ to the Blasting Music. However, the sweetest music is played on the big board, because the opening $ 33 shares priced at $ 142 before the Skyr fired at $ 90.

After returning to California in the field of time, it was worth more than $ 5 billion. But he doesn’t want to talk about that. The story, in his mind, is not about any organization to be public, but the IPO of the design itself. “What I am most careful about is that our product will be in 5 years, 10 years,” he said. “What are we designing ahead?”

Not to concentrate toward money is probably a good idea. The day we are talking, the price of figure shares has dropped by 2 percent, its evaluation is more than $ 40 billion from about $ 60 billion. It is still higher than the expectation. When the Figure IPO designs celebrate, it is not the only company expecting revolution in the field. AI will start a new era in design. Figma, like its competitors, will be defined by how it operates that technology. In the end, it is not yet clear whether AI will help its business or blow it up.

Field work

Every time I talk to the field, it seems that it seems to be 19 -year -old Thiel colleagues and the company that he cuffs from Brown University to the fig. From the beginning, the figure-based app of figs allows people to cooperate with online design and a brain storm. It has increased the following following a loyal to the giant on design equipment, Adobe. During our first meeting in 2022, I pressed the field on that David and Goliath Trops – and whether he could pull any Instagram and sell it to a large company. The field talked continuously how he was in it for a long way. In fact, he had a privacy that he could not share: Adobe just offered $ 20 billion for his company and he was going to take it. The news was broken a few weeks after our conversation. When I face her He apologized about that at the wired conference in San Francisco last December. “I felt very bad about it,” he told me.

The next time we talked, in December 2023, that deal was Just got separatedBecause former President Joe Biden’s judiciary indicates that it will object to solidarity. The field was clearly trembling but was determined to continue its original plan to create such an organization that people would change the way to create applications, websites, docs and decks. It was not easy, because a few months’ speed was ready to integrate with the big firm.

For the next two years, Figma extends his offers and keeps the fans win. Its 1 million users simply indicate its all -time: billions of people see the work produced in its app. Fortune uses 95 percent of the products in 500 companies. Figma turned into a profit. And post-IPO, even after its stock is flat, what Adobe was going to pay for it was more than double.

Nevertheless, I was a little surprised that this field seemed necessary for the IPO when startups nowadays can reach the stratosphereric assessment without accountability Michigus that becomes a public firm. The ownership of the field community, corporate hygiene to follow reporting rules, and how to buy a share in Figa, refer to people to better understand their business. In the end, he said, “If you are becoming universal in the end, why not do it right now?”

To design or lose

Many technology leaders have the rituals such as the public, the field wrote Letter Prospectus where he promised higher values than profit. (These vows usually wrap their writers as a profit-seeker as a morph.) Basically, the letter is an argument that is now a central place in People’s life in the design. The way people make the product and express themselves are not just an important reason: it The Factor. “Design,” he wrote, “bigger than the design.” When I ask what he meant, he does not easily unpack Quona. “It is something that can mean a lot,” he said. “How you win or lose is the emergence of design to solve a more common problem from the pixel level craft.”

He explained that in the early 2000s, the design was about to make things beautiful. In the 20’s, people were imitating the philosophy of Steve Jobs, which was about the function of the design. Now, the field says, the design is not just both of those things, but our communication means – who are you, what your brand means, how you are involved with the public. The field says, “Built in our world software, and more software is created, the more the design becomes the original differentitator.” This is our new language, and Figma wants to be duilango for those efforts to master it.