How Dylan Field Built Figma into a $20B Giant by the Age 30.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, and when Adobe announced plans to acquire Figma for a jaw-dropping $20 billion in September 2022, it was a ten-year overnight success story. The deal was mutually terminated in December 2023 due to regulatory concerns. Figma remains an independent company. But his journey to building the world’s most beloved design tool wasn’t smooth. It was filled with self-doubt, wrong turns, leadership struggles, and relentless vision.
Let’s dive into how a college dropout built a company that took on design giant Adobe and won.
The Vision: Design for All
Back in 2012, Dylan Field was just 19, fresh off winning a Thiel Fellowship and dropping out of Brown University. With his co-founder, Evan Wallace, a technical genius, Dylan wanted to build something radically new.
They were obsessed with WebGL — a then-new browser graphics technology. More importantly, they believed that design tools were broken: expensive, hard to learn, and inaccessible to many. Dylan wasn’t an artist himself, and felt firsthand how hard it was to bring ideas to life using legacy tools like Photoshop.
They had one core belief: if a tool is too complex for people to use, it’s a moral failing.
The Wrong Start: Meme Generator Madness
Even visionaries mess up. Figma didn’t begin as the billion-dollar design platform we know today. Dylan and Evan’s first idea? A WebGL meme generator. Yes — they dropped out of Ivy League college to build a glorified joke app.
“I remember staring in the mirror thinking, ‘What am I doing with my life? I dropped out for this?’” Dylan later recalled.
This crisis of purpose forced a pivot. They realized meme generators weren’t meaningful. They wanted to build something that mattered — something they could see themselves working on for the next 10 years.
The Real Start: Designing the Future
By mid-2013, Dylan and Evan committed to building Figma — a browser-based design tool that would allow real-time collaboration. Their goal was to make design accessible, not just to designers, but to entire teams: developers, marketers, PMs — anyone involved in building digital products.
Figma was bold. No one had successfully built a browser-first design tool at scale. The technology was early. Investors were skeptical. The team toiled away in stealth mode for years:
- Started in August 2012
- Closed beta launched in December 2015
- Public launch came in October 2016
- Started charging only in 2017
Even Dylan admits: “We moved way too slow because of perfectionism.”
Leading Through Chaos: Learning to Be CEO
The hardest part of Dylan’s journey wasn’t technology. It was becoming a leader.
Early on, Dylan made bad hires, micromanaged smart people, and struggled with team morale. Things came to a head when several employees confronted him. At the same time, his father was dying of cancer — the pressure was immense.
“I thought everyone might leave. That this was the end.”
But Dylan didn’t quit. He hired experienced managers, leaned on executive coaches, and grew into the CEO Figma needed. He realized that management is a learnable skill, and that empowering your team — not controlling them — is the only way to scale.
The Product Philosophy: Nothing Great is Made Alone
Figma wasn’t just a design tool. It was a collaboration platform. Dylan and his team understood that product design is a team sport.
Gone were the days of the designer as the lone genius unveiling a masterpiece. Figma allowed live collaboration — like Google Docs, but for design. Engineers, PMs, and marketers could all jump into the same file, reducing bottlenecks and increasing alignment.
That same thinking led to the launch of FigJam, a whiteboarding tool for brainstorming. Built during COVID in just 6–7 months, FigJam proved Figma could move fast and still ship meaningful features.
The Bottom Line
Figma didn’t happen overnight. It took 12 years, thousands of mistakes, moments of doubt, and relentless obsession with making design accessible.
Dylan Field went from being a dropout with imposter syndrome to the CEO of one of the most important design companies of this generation.
So the question is: What will your line of code be?
