Figma’s Rise to the Top
For decades Adobe has been an industry leader when it comes to design. There is no surprise it is worth over $100 billion. No company has even come close to Adobe’s software until some college students developed a browser-based collaborative design tool.
But how could some university students take on one of the world’s biggest companies? This is the story of Dylan Field and how he changed the design industry forever with Figma.
Early days
Grew up in Penngrove, California, and was the only child. From an early age was interested in Mathematics and Computer Science. Apart from that he also worked in TV ads as a child actor.
Studied at Technology High School where he built robots and websites. Got a chance to work closely with social media researcher Danah Bloyd.
College life
He got accepted to one of the most prestigious schools in the world — Brown University where he studied Computer Science. As a Computer Science department member, he was quite active and organized various events.
Along with university he interned at companies like LinkedIn and Flipboard. Could not decide if his decision to pursue a major in Computer Science and Maths was a good choice. Hence, worked for another six months at Flipboard as a Technical Product Manager intern.
Dropping out
Met Evan Wallace who was a year ahead of him. He was a TA at Brown studying graphics. They decided to start a company together.
Dylan applied for Thiel Fellowship which granted young entrepreneurs a $100,000 grant given they drop out of college to build something they were passionate about. Faced a lot of opposition from his parents too.
Out of 500 applicants, only 20 were selected and Field was one of them. Dropped out of college to pursue his dream.
The beginning
In 2012, Dylan became a Thiel Fellow which granted him $100,000. Co-founded Figma with Evan Wallace who joined him after completing his undergraduation.
At the start, it was quite messy. Originally, he had planned to develop drone software, but it didn’t work. Field’s main objective was to build something that would make it possible for anyone to be creative by developing free, simple, and easy-to-use tools in a browser.
Pivoting
One day Evan showed him a demo of WebGL that he had built which demonstrated a sphere in a pool of water. This new technology looked promising and they decided to build something with it.
At first, wanted to make a photo editing web application which they called “Photoshop in the browser” but later focused on interface design. While design at its core is collaborative most of the popular design tools available at the time were single-player and offline. Saw a huge problem and decided to make a design tool similar to Google Docs that would allow collaboration and real-time sharing.
Building Figma
It was not an easy and straightforward journey. Faced a lot of difficulties and problems on the way. The beta version of Figma took years to launch. This resulted in frustrated employees who end up quitting.
Raising Capital
Secured their first seed round of $4 million in 2013 backed by investors like Danny Rimer, Index Ventures, and Jeff Weiner. Yet the company was still not clear about what product it was building and what problem it was trying to solve.
Ex Mozilla CEO John Lilly who earlier rejected them later led Greylock’s Series A investment of $14 million into Figma in 2015.
Public Launch
In late 2015 the company launched its first beta product into the market which received mixed reviews.
Two years later launched its first paid product after acquiring its first set of customers. Soon it became popular and many companies were switching to Figma. In April 2020, Figma raised $200 million and as of 2021, it was valued at over $10 billion.
Journey to #1
Figma solved so many problems which made it a designer’s favorite choice. It became the number one tool when it came to designing especially interface design. Along with that, it built a wonderful community of creatives who could achieve things that earlier were thought impossible. Now it was possible to do many things in the same program without the need to switch to a different one.
Some top reasons that make it different from other tools:
- Real-time collaboration
- Browser based
- Awesome Prototyping
- Easy handoff
- Layout Grid
- Components
- Free Version
- Easy to learn
- Online Community
- Plugins
Today Figma’s users range from freelancers, and small and medium-sized enterprises to large organizations like Microsoft, Spotify, Airbnb, GitHub, Dropbox, Zoom, and Uber.
Acquisition by Adobe
Recently Adobe acquired Figma for a whopping $20 billion taking out its biggest rival. This is not the first time Adobe has done something like this to eliminate its competition. It has caused a lot of controversies, with the majority of people unhappy with the deal. Both companies will run independently until the transaction is closed which is expected to happen in 2023.
Future Plans
Shantanu Narayen, Chief Executive Officer of Adobe, called Figma’s business “the future of work” and said there were “tremendous opportunities” in combining it with his company’s offerings, such as document reader Acrobat and online whiteboard Figjam. Before anything else, the company plans to prioritize its users and autonomy.
Dylan Field in a statement, said, “With Adobe’s amazing innovation and expertise, especially in 3D, video, vector, imaging, and fonts, we can further reimagine end-to-end product design in the browser, while building new tools and spaces to empower customers to design products faster and more easily.
Conclusion
Whether Figma is free or paid doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s just another tool/software. The most important thing is your skills and knowledge. Skills are primary and tools are secondary. An important decision such as this is not left solely in the hands of one individual; many people are involved. On the bright side, we could see some major and groundbreaking developments in Figma that would transform the design industry.
