When Dylan Field He appears on my zoom screen, his face is a mixture of dizziness and fatigue. He returned to work, after a trip to Fresh York, where he launched his company Figima on the Fresh York Stock Exchange, entertaining the trend of startups worth many billion dollars, remaining private. Even before it became clear that it could be the wildest public premiere for years, Figma World – Fans of the App, employees (known as figi) and investors – have already turned Wall Street into a block of flats, distributing loot, serving a free pizza and blowing up music from DJ, which was shocked by Caverns of Mammon. But the sweetest music played on the Large Board, because the opening of stock price 33 USD rapidly increased to 142 USD before settling for comfortable USD 90.
Before Field returned to California, he was worth over $ 5 billion. But he doesn’t want to talk about it. In his opinion, history is not about a public company, but an IPO of the project. “I care about what our product will be in 5 years, 10 years,” he says. “Do we follow?”
Not focusing on money is probably a good idea. On the day we say, the price of Figma shares dropped by 27 percent, reducing the valuation from around $ 60 billion to just over $ 40 billion. This is still much higher than anyone expected. While IPO Figma celebrates the project, it is not the only company that hopes to revolutionize the field. AI will initiate a up-to-date designing era. Figma, like its competitors, will be defined by the way it supports this technology. Ultimately, it is still not clear whether artificial intelligence will assist her business or blow her up.
Field work
Every time I talk to Field, it seems that something monumental is happening to Figa, a company that he co-found as 19-year-old Thiel Fellow and rejection from Brown University. From the very beginning, the Figma -based application allowed people to cooperate and brainstorming about online design. He was committed to the giant of design tools, Adobe. During our first meeting in 2022, I pressed the field of this trail David and Goliath – and whether it can pull out Instagram and sell a larger company. Field nobly talked about how he was in him in the long run. In fact, he had a secret he could not divide: Adobe had just offered $ 20 billion for his company and intended to take it. The messages diverged several weeks after our conversation. When I confronted him at a wired conference in San Francisco in December last year, he apologized. “I felt so bad,” he told me.
The next time we talked in December 2023, this contract had It just fell apartBecause the Department of Justice of former President Joe Biden indicated that this connection would oppose. Field was clearly shocked, but determined to continue its original plan to build a company that would change the way people create applications, websites, documents and decks. It was not uncomplicated because the months of the rush were wasted to prepare to connect to a larger company.
Over the next two years, Figma expanded its offer and winning fans. Its 13 million users only indicate its ubiquity: the work produced in the application is apparent by billions of people. Of the companies from the Fortune list 500 95 percent utilize the product. Figma is gaining profit. And post-IPO, even after leveling in stocks, is worth more than twice as much as Adobe, will pay for it.
Despite this, I was a bit surprised that the field thought that IPO was necessary when startups nowadays could achieve stratospheric valuations without mandiigas responsibility, which results from the becoming of a public company. Field cites the benefits of the ownership of the community, corporate hygiene to comply with reporting rules and how the option to purchase shares in Figma will lead people to a better understanding of its activities. Ultimately, he says: “If you are finally going to make public, why not do it now?”
Designing or losing
How is it usual for many technology leaders who public, wrote Field Founder’s letter In a prospectus, in which he promised higher values than profits. (These weddings usually persecute their authors as scanty entrepreneurs transforming into yacht profit profits.) Basically, the letter is an argument that the project now has a central place in people’s lives. This is not only an critical factor in the way people build products and express themselves: it is . factor. “Design”, he wrote, “is greater than design.” When I ask what he meant, the koana does not unpack too easily. “This is something that can mean many things,” he says. “This is an increase in design, from craftsmanship at pixel level to more general problem solving, to how you win or lose.”
He explains that at the beginning of the 21st century, the project was that everything was nice. In 2010, people imitated Steve Jobs’s philosophy that the project was concerned. Now, as Field says, the project is not only these things, but our means of communication – who you are, which your brand means, how you engage with public opinion. Our world is based on software, says Field, and the more software is created, the more projects become the main distinguishing feature. This is our up-to-date language, and Figma wants to be substantial for those who try to control it.