At a time when markets are unstable and billionaire fortunes are swinging wildly, Adobe has gone ahead with one of the biggest tech deals — announcing its intent to purchase Figma for $20 billion. Prior to the announcement, Adobe’s largest deal was its $4.75 billion Marketo acquisition in 2018.
Most haven’t heard of Figma though its cloud-based collaboration tools have been gaining traction among software developers and product managers who build apps. Figma is browser-based software that makes UX/UI collaboration seamless.
Equally interesting are the people behind the company — Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. Dylan’s story is the stuff that gets featured in history books dedicated to the Silicon Valley. Four years ago, Dylan Field, now 30, was living in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, where, according to Wall Street Journal, he would stop for a $1 cup of coffee on his way to work.
‘Design is a team sport’
Let’s rewind a bit. Field grew up just north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, California, which is a part of the area’s wine region. His love for computer science was ignited when his family bought a computer and the three-year-old slowly learned to use it.
Ultimately, he attended Brown University and studied computer science and mathematics. Field never considered himself a good student and only by joining a robotics team in high school and taking college-level courses was he able to progress.
After two and a half years at the university, he took a leave of absence in 2012 and accepted a Thiel fellowship, run by the billionaire financier Peter Thiel; it offered applicants $100,000 in no-strings-attached funding if they agreed to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurial aims. His pitch: software to modify drones to monitor traffic and catch reckless drivers. The drone project didn’t work but the other idea took off — Figma, which he started Evan Wallace (the two had met in college).
Ultimately, it took the duo four years to launch the first public version of their virtual sketch board for designers. “The entire economy is going from physical to digital, and design is just the latest chapter,” Field told Forbes in 2021. “And design is a team sport—it’s collaborative by nature.”
Figma founders Evan Wallace (left) and Dylan Field
Figma is about the web
Even by Silicon Valley standards, the growth of Figma has been dazzling. In early 2018, the company was valued privately at $115 million and by 2021, in another fundraising round that valuation had increased to $10 billion. We need to catch a breath and look at the valuation because it comes at a time when prices for most technology companies, public and private, have been in free fall in recent months.
According to WSJ, the early days of Figma had an address above a busy bar and on Fridays, starting around 3pm, the noise was unbearable. The team wasn’t the pub-hopping kind.
It was during the pandemic, Figma’s reputation grew rapidly, like other software services. Its clients included Uber Technologies Inc. and Square Inc (now known as Block Inc). When The New York Times made a design system for NYT Cooking on Android, the company blog stated how it used Figma because of its “powerful Team Library feature and its ease of use for engineers…. The two most important features in Figma for a design system are Styles and Components. Styles are basic elements such as colour and typography. Components are more complex elements, such as buttons or navigation bars.”
For Adobe, purchasing Figma makes sense. Figma is about the web. According to The Verge, Adobe plans to combine its own community with Figma, and it’s likely that will involve bundling Figma products and services into Adobe Creative Suite at some point in the future. For the moment, Figma remains untouched. . “We plan to continue to run Figma the way we have always run Figma — continuing to do what we believe is best for our community, our culture and our business,” says Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma.
Adobe is best-known by consumers for software programmes, including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat. For Figma, the company can leverage Adobe’s expertise in 3D, video, vector, imaging, and fonts to improve product design on the web. Figma’s big advantage is its browser-based tools that work simultaneously across various platforms while its rivals have products that operate only on a desktop or an app.
By the way, there’s a bit more to the Figma story. Last year, Wallace left the company because he was burned out by work. This year has been a big one — Field became a new father, decided against an initial public offering and, of course, shook hands with Adobe. Here’s a billionaire in the making.