For fanboys in the crypto world, however, Field’s apparent market savvy is not surprising. Back in 2018, while he was on holiday with his girlfriend (now wife) in Thailand, he became obsessed with a piece of digital art. He had come across Cryptopunk 7804, a pixelated illustration of an alien, and Field, an art-lover at heart, could not let it go.
“I talked about it pretty much non-stop. And my wife went, ‘Just do it. Do it, and then let’s move on and enjoy our holiday,'” he said recently on The Times Tech Podcast.
So he spent $15,000 on this digital artwork, before wondering whether he might have just thrown away his money on a bit of nonsense. Fast-forward three years, and the craze over NFTs (non-fungible tokens) had taken hold. NFTs are scarce, digital collectibles that exist on the blockchain, a public ledger that displays an object’s chain of custody.
At the height of the pandemic, NFTs were, for a brief time, all the rage; few more so than cryptopunks.
Amid the froth, Field sold his beloved alien for $7.5 million, a 500-fold return on his quixotic investment. He still rues the decision. “I actually felt a lot of regret afterwards,” he said. “I kind of thought about this like the digital Mona Lisa. Long term, this will be one of the most important pieces of digital art, and I have some sadness to no longer have that affiliation with it.”
Perhaps last week’s bonanza will salve his sorrow.
The Figma float set Silicon Valley and Wall Street aflutter, spurring hopes that it could open the floodgates to a deluge of stock market debuts after several fallow years. The alternative is that Figma is a one-off — a different type of company run by a uniquely talented entrepreneur.
* Tech’s venture capitalists switch to survival mode in a brutal slowdown
That entrepreneur was something of a boy genius. Gifted in maths, he was doing algebra by the age of six. His father, a respiratory therapist, and mother, a teacher, sent him to a specialised school that was strong on maths; instead of football, it had a robotics team. “He’s always been a little weird,” his father, Andy, told a local newspaper.
Field began taking university courses while still in high school before getting into Brown University, the Ivy League college in Rhode Island. It was around this time that Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor, launched his “20 under 20” programme (now known as the Thiel Fellowship), through which he offered $100,000 scholarships to gifted students on the condition that they dropped out of university and got working on whatever idea captured their fancy.
Aged 19, Field won a spot. He dropped out of Brown to work on his idea for a new type of design software that would be free and easy to use. In his 2012 video pitch, an impossibly young-looking Field explained that “creative tools like [Adobe] Photoshop are very expensive and very hard to use. What we are trying to do is to make it so that anyone can be creative by creating free, simple creative tools in the browser.”
It was a bold idea. Back in 2012, graphic design often required $10,000 workstations that packed immense computing power. Field reckoned he could leverage the rise of cloud data centres and come up with more intuitive software to not only reimagine how to design, but how much it cost and who might turn their hand to it. He convinced his tutor from Brown, Evan Wallace, to drop out with him and have a go.
Danny Rimer, whose venture capital firm Index Ventures led a $3.8 million seed round in Figma, and who has been a board director since 2014, said: “I don’t back every 19-year-old I meet.” But as a teenager, Field, who was interning at another Index start-up, Flipboard, had somehow ended up presenting to the board. “He really made an impression on me and my partners.” Rimer recalled. Specifically, he said, it was his ambition, clarity of thought and humility about his own ideas.
Jeff Weiner, the former chief executive of LinkedIn, where Field also interned, was equally impressed. He too became an early investor.
The end of the story was supposed to come in September 2022, when Adobe — the industry giant that the 19-year-old Dylan had first targeted back in 2012 — announced a $20 billion takeover of Figma. The all-cash deal would have crystallised an immense fortune not only for Field and Wallace, who left the company in 2021, but many of the rank-and-file workers. However, the US justice department and Britain’s Competition & Markets Authority both opened investigations. The deal stalled. A year later, in December 2023, they called it off.
* Figma chief Dylan Field joins Silicon Valley criticism of UK competition watchdog
It was a pivotal moment. For many of the “Figmates” (what they called Figma employees), the life-changing sums of cash they were set to receive for their stock suddenly vanished.
So the first thing Field did was use some of the $1 billion that Adobe handed over as a break-up fee to offer generous packages for anyone who wanted to leave. “Only 4 per cent of folks signed up to the severance packages,” Rimer said. “That gives you a sense of how unique it is, that culture he has created.”
For those who remained, Field made it clear that the company was shifting back to intense “start-up mode”. In the 18 months since that deal died, Figma has doubled its suite of products from four to eight, including some, like Figma Draw, that are direct competitors to those from Adobe, its former merger partner. He has also increased the price of other products, and the cash has rolled in.
Sales surged nearly 50 per cent last year to $749 million. A massive $739 million loss in 2024, due to a big increase in marketing and research spending, also turned positive in 2025, with $45 million in net income for the first quarter on $228 million in sales.
But the hard work is ahead. A host of AI start-ups are gunning for Figma, promising, as Field once did, to harness a powerful new technology to unseat the industry leader.
Yet Field is well placed to take on the challengers. Like many tech founders he is, in effect, an emperor. He owns 51 per cent of the voting shares and his co-founder, Wallace, whose stake was worth $3 billion as of Thursday, gifted Field control of his 25 per cent voting block. This is not a democracy. Investors are banking, instead, that it will be a benevolent dictatorship.
“Some companies run out of ideas as they scale. At Figma, we have more ideas than ever,” Field wrote last week.
“Expect us to take big swings when we see a chance to invest in our platform or pursue M&A at scale. That means at times we will make decisions that may not seem immediately rational. And, while we always strive to exercise good judgment, sometimes we will make the wrong calls. If you decide to invest in Figma, we hope you will take a long-term view and stay patient.”
There are worse bets to make. Just ask Rimer, Weiner and the former owner of Cryptopunk 7804.
