1The Child Actor Turned Coder
Dylan Field was born in 1992 in Penngrove, California. As a child, he performed in local plays and booked commercials for eToys and Windows XP. By middle school, he was spending time with a janitor described as a "math savant."
At 6, he mastered algebra. At Technology High School, he fell in love with web development. An internship at LinkedIn in 2010, another at Flipboard—he was building his network before he could legally drink.
2The Thiel Fellowship Bet
In 2012, Field received a Thiel Fellowship—$100,000 to drop out of Brown University and start a company. He moved to San Francisco with co-founder Evan Wallace and started experimenting.
They tried many ideas: drone software, a meme generator. Nothing clicked. But one thing kept coming back: what if design tools worked in the browser, and what if multiple people could work together in real-time?
Everyone said professional design tools couldn't run in a browser. Adobe was too entrenched. But Field believed the web was the future of software—and collaboration was the killer feature desktop apps couldn't match.
3Four Years in the Wilderness
It took four years to get Figma to launch publicly—September 27, 2016. In that time, frustrated employees quit. Investors grew impatient. Field got a "wake-up call" when investor John Lilly told him: "I don't think you know what you're doing yet."
"Those four years were brutal. But we were building something that couldn't be built quickly. Real-time collaboration at that performance level in a browser had never been done."
— Dylan Field
When Figma finally launched, designers immediately understood: this was how design tools should work. Netflix, Zoom, and Airbnb became early adopters.
4The $20 Billion Deal That Died
In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion—the largest acquisition of a private software company ever. Field, holding roughly 10%, was set to receive $2 billion.
But regulators in the US and UK had concerns about competition. After 15 months of uncertainty, Adobe abandoned the deal in December 2023. Field described it as "a very stressful time."
The Failed Deal:
$20B acquisition blocked by regulators
The Outcome:
IPO in 2025, Field worth $6.6B
In August 2025, Figma went public on the NYSE. The failed acquisition became a footnote—Field was worth more than he would have been under the Adobe deal.
5Key Lessons for Founders
1. Make the contrarian bet
"Browser-based design" sounded crazy when Adobe owned the market. The best opportunities often exist where consensus says they don't.
2. Be patient with technical moats
Four years to launch is an eternity in startups. But that time built something competitors couldn't easily replicate.
3. Collaboration is the feature
Real-time multiplayer wasn't a nice-to-have—it was the entire value proposition. The web enabled something desktop never could.
4. Survive to the upside
The Adobe deal failing felt like disaster. But Field kept building, and the IPO outcome was better. Resilience creates optionality.