Dylan Field.

Dylan Field grew up in Penngrove, California, and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study computer science and math. In 2012 he received a Thiel Fellowship — a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel's program to drop out of college and build something. He left Penn, partnered with Evan Wallace (a graphics researcher then at Stanford), and the two began work on what would become Figma. They spent four years in stealth, building a vector graphics engine that ran in the browser using WebGL — a technical bet that almost every contemporary designer thought was impossible. Figma launched publicly in September 2016.

The early Figma years were a referendum on whether designers would tolerate a browser-based tool when Sketch and Adobe Illustrator were the established standards. The first three years were a slow drip of design teams switching one at a time, usually after the multiplayer collaboration feature changed how they ran design reviews. The next test was Adobe. In September 2022, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire Figma for $20B in cash and stock — at the time, the largest acquisition of a private software company in history. Fifteen months later, in December 2023, the deal was abandoned in the face of regulatory objections from the European Commission and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. Adobe paid Figma a $1B termination fee and walked away. Field, who had been preparing for a year and a half to be inside Adobe, suddenly had to rebuild the operating tempo of an independent company without losing the talent that had been built for the merger.

Figma's post-Adobe arc was one of the most-watched in software. The product line expanded into FigJam (whiteboarding, 2021), Dev Mode (developer handoff, 2023), Figma Slides (presentations, 2024), and increasingly into AI-assisted design surfaces. Annualized recurring revenue, per press reports through 2024–25, crossed $700M and kept growing. The IPO filing came in 2025, with Figma pricing as one of the largest SaaS IPOs of the decade. Field has been clear, in interviews after the Adobe deal collapsed, that the independent path was always the higher-variance outcome — and that the company chose to keep running it.

Field's recurring operating themes are technical leverage, multiplayer as a primitive, and patience under acquisition pressure. The browser-based WebGL bet was a four-year technical investment that gave Figma a moat Sketch and Illustrator could not catch — every desktop competitor would have had to rewrite their entire rendering engine. The multiplayer feature was, in Field's framing, not a feature at all but the actual primitive that made design teams switch — once you ran a design review with five people editing simultaneously, going back to Sketch felt regressive. And the Adobe period taught the company to ship as if the deal would never close, which turned out to be exactly the right operating posture.