Will Griffith had only been two months in his job as a venture investor for Iconiq when he met a 19-year-old college dropout named Dylan Field. This would lead to one of his signature seed investments, in a startup called Figma.
On Thursday, Figma went public with the stock popping from the $33 IPO opening price to close at $115.50 and a $47 billion market cap. And Griffith could not be more effusive in his praise for the company.
“You go to one of these user conferences and you’re like, there’s 15,000 people here and 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith smiled. From the earliest days, the founders of this company that offers software for designers had “a fervent desire to win and deliver and redefine this ecosystem.”
Yet in 2013 at that first meeting, co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were untested. And at that point, so was Iconiq. It was known then as the very secretive wealth management firm for many of Silicon Valley’s richest tech moguls, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Figma, however, already had a champion: Field had been an intern at LinkedIn under its then CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner was an angel investor (and bought more stock at later rounds, too) and introduced Field to Griffith.
“We got connected to Figma before we had an early fund, before we had any venture fund,” Griffith told TechCrunch. The investor remembers trekking out to meet the founders. “It was like two guys and the dog in an apartment in Palo Alto, and they were working on these newfangled graphics and design capability in a browser.”
The demo showed how light could be manipulated when editing a photo in a browser. At the time, browser-based design software, based on WebGL, was revolutionary. Tech giant Adobe had the graphics design market locked up with its desktop software. “I thought it was insane,” Griffith recalled.
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The idea was so unproven Alexis Ohanian, who was investing out of his then firm Initialized, passed on Figma when he saw the product years later in 2016, he noted in a tweet this week. Ohanian called Figma a member of his “embarrassing miss-list.”
But Griffith wrote a check. Seed shares, by the way, were priced at $0.0878 each, Figma disclosed in its S-1A. And Griffith wrote more checks as Figma raised additional rounds. The company raised a total of about $332 million in venture funding through 2024, PitchBook estimates.
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