Origins
Has anyone here heard of Figma? I hadn’t heard of it until a few years ago. But If I were to ask if you have heard of Adobe, I bet many of you know what it is. Figma is a design platform that is a web-based design tool that allows users to create, share, and test digital products and services. It is often looped into the same group around designers when talking about Adobe and its many products. Figma’s founder Dylan Field was just 20 years old when he and his classmate Evan Wallace released it to the public. While Field was working as an intern for Flipboard and LinkedIn he was spotted to have great potential. Which they most certainly were not wrong. Against Fields’ parents’ wishes he decided to drop of college at Brown University to participate in the Thiel Fellowship program which led to him earning a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel co-founder of PayPal.
Future Trends
It took 4 years of testing and development before it was released to market in 2016. Figma has a flexible feature set and a freemium pricing scale that helped take some market away from Adobe. Figma saw great success during the pandemic due to so many having much more free time to learn about things and software that interested them. Figma soon grew to 850 employees and was set to be bought by Adobe for $20 billion. However, this deal soon fell through in 2023 and both companies agreed to terminate their merger agreement. As of the summer of 2024 Figma was on track to hit $700 million annual recurring revenue. Nevertheless, Figma is a huge powerhouse when it comes to general design and I have found it is incredibly powerful at website design, something that think Adobe is lacking. It is a very great resource to know both design software’s because there are things that one does better than the other.
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Wow! This is so cool! I have never heard of Figma, but I have heard of Adobe. I think it is so interesting how Field received a grant from Peter Thiel. Field’s idea was not 0 to 1, but he knew how to make it work and how to grow it. His innovation really demonstrates how impactful persistence really is in making a business work.
I love how you wrote this post! It is very easy to follow and such a cool business as well. I have never heard of Figma, and I am definitely going to check it out. It is inspiring to see how Field saw an opening in something he wanted to pursue and was able to pivot despite what some may have thought.