The crisis that built a $12B company

Imagine you’re the founder and CEO of a young tech startup. Your company is under pressure to deliver — just as you are. And the pressure is increasing, because today your whole senior team is calling you to a meeting. Their message to you is as serious and unambiguous as it can be: “We think you need some help.”

———

This is what happened to Dylan Field approximately two years into building “Figma,” a now hugely successful software company valued at $12.5 billion.

Field’s journey began in 2012 when he applied for the prestigious “Thiel Fellowship.”

The program gives young founders $100,000 to work on their ideas. Field was lucky enough to be selected — but, as part of the program’s requirements, he also had to drop out of Brown University. He was now forced to go all-in on his entrepreneurial ambitions.

His vision for what he wanted to build was truly bold.

He wanted to revolutionize the design software market, a space that was dominated by Adobe, an absolute behemoth. To give you a bit of context: in 2023, Adobe brought in around $20 billion in revenue. But as if this wasn’t enough, Field wanted to build his software in a way that had never been done before — as a browser-based tool. Even the best software engineers in the world would have admitted that building a web-based design platform was a gigantic technical challenge. Rendering complex graphics efficiently in a browser? This was unprecedented at the time.

Unsurprisingly, many in the design community were skeptical.

Could the browser, something that in 2012 was barely stable enough to display news sites and cookie recipes, really power something as complex as a graphics tool? And would it be worth switching from established tools like Adobe and Sketch, who were the undefeated incumbents — and had chosen desktop technology, not the browser.

But not only the design community was skeptical: for many potential investors, Field’s vision was too bold as well. The outlook of capturing a fish as big as the design tool market was certainly attractive. But the idea that a first-time founder could really pull this off? Unlikely, to put it mildly…

All of this put an incredible amount of pressure not only on Field, but also on his team.

Even after multiple years of development, they stood there empty-handed, without a salable product.

Such a scenario would have overwhelmed even the most experienced founders. But Field, 23 years young at that time, had no leadership experience prior to Figma. His previous jobs had been at Flipboard and LinkedIn — as an intern!

No wonder this pressure-cooker finally exploded. Field’s senior team staged an intervention, urging him to seek help in leading the company. Field needed a break and left the office for a few days…

This could have easily been the end of the story. But Field returned. And he accepted the challenge to become the leader his company needed.

One of the key decisions that turned the ship around was that he listened to his team and indeed sought help. He hired Sho Kuwamoto, a seasoned executive with years of experience building and leading teams in this space (and who had previously worked at Adobe, Figma’s main competitor).

———

When researching Field’s story, I wondered where he took the courage to pursue such a bold vision. He was reaching for the stars. But the likelihood of failure was immense.

The mere prospect of revolutionizing such a huge market must have been a strong motivation. But he had at least one additional reason, beyond just building a successful company:

In the end, Field was right to persevere: as of 2023, Figma brought in approximately $600 million in revenue, at a valuation of around $12.5 billion. He had aimed high — and knocked it out of the park.

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📊32% — An "Officevibe" survey showed that 32% of employees have to wait more than 3 months to get feedback from their manager. A dangerously long time, in my opinion, because feedback is most valuable only when it's fresh.

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