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Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, signs the guestbook on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York on July 31, 2025. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg may be the most famous college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Field is the latest, after his design startup Figma soared in its stock market debut this week. The two entrepreneurs have something else in common: close ties to Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg got his first outside check for Facebook from Thiel in 2004, soon before leaving Harvard University to build his social network in Silicon Valley. Facebook went public in 2012, the same year that Field scored a Thiel Fellowship, which gives money "to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom." Over 300 people have been selected since its inception in 2011. Field, now 33, was part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a group of 20 entrepreneurs who each took home $100,000. The program doubled that sum earlier this year. Like Zuckerberg, Field came to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. On Thursday, Figma's stock price more than tripled in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. It rose again on Friday, wrapping up the week with a fully diluted market cap above $71 billion. Field's stake is worth about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is now the world's third-richest person, with a net worth of over $260 billion. While the contours of Field's story may sound familiar, he's a very different kind of character. "Dylan is, by far, the most humble billionaire I've ever met," said Joshua Browder, CEO of legal services startup DoNotPay and a former Thiel fellow.
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Mike Gibson, who used to help run the fellows program as vice president for grants at the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, contrasts Field with another tech luminary. "He's kind of like the anti-Steve Jobs," said Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a venture firm that prides itself on investing in dropouts. "When it comes to Jobs' legend as this hard-charging a--hole, Dylan is the opposite." The Apple co-founder, who dropped out of college after one semester, died of cancer in 2011, as his company was on its way to becoming the most valuable business in the world. Field was poised to officially enter the billionaire ranks almost three years ago. With Figma having emerged as a leader in web-based tools for designing apps and websites, Adobe agreed to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. But regulators in the U.K. said the tie-up would've hurt competition, and the companies scrapped the transaction in late 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup fee. Figma's IPO this week represented not only a massive valuation markup for the company but also served as a banner event for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs since the market cratered in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates. "The most important thing to remind myself of, the team of, is share price is a moment in time," Field told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday. "We're going to see all sorts of behavior probably today, over the weeks ahead." Figma declined to make Field available for an interview for this story. Field's trek back to the Bay Area, where he'd grown up, began with a TechCrunch article about the fellowship. He submitted his application two hours before the deadline, on New Year's Eve of 2011, while he was a junior at Brown. He left out his SAT scores.
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"It is my belief that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and can easily be gamed," he wrote in his application, which he posted on LinkedIn years later. In the essay section, he was asked to offer a highly controversial take. "Chocolate is repulsive," he wrote. "Even the smell of it makes me want to vomit." In response to a question about how he was going to change the world, Field said he was going to build better software for drones, and that he would "cofound a company with the smartest programmer I know and work on this problem." That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a teaching assistant for some of Field's courses at Brown. Wallace was technologically gifted, earning the nickname "computer Jesus," or CJ. But he was already 20, meaning he was too old to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship. Field scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to leave his academic pursuits. The pair moved into a small apartment in Palo Alto, California. The drone software plan had gone out the window. Wallace wanted to develop something related to WebGL, a graphics rendering system for web browsers. A year later, they were showing investors a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the movement of a ball in a pool of water.
'Anyone can be creative'
The obvious competitive target was Adobe, which was ending development of Fireworks, an app design product that it acquired with the 2005 Macromedia purchase. "We thought, 'Wait, maybe there's an opportunity here,'" Field said on a podcast earlier this year. "What we're trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative, by creating free, simple creative tools in the browser," Field said in a 2012 interview for a CNBC special on the Thiel Fellowship. In 2013, the founders started talking with investors about raising a seed round. Field showed the pool water demo to John Lilly of Greylock Partners at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had previously been CEO of Mozilla, where an engineer developed software that led to WebGL. He was impressed with what he was seeing, but he didn't think it had much economic potential. Figma took on seed funding from Index Ventures and other investors. The founders assembled a small group of employees at an office in Palo Alto. Progress was slow. Early versions of the product failed to impress potential users. Field was micromanaging. When Figma would show the product to companies in the Bay Area, reception wasn't always great. Stress was building. Lilly, who ended up leading Figma's Series A round in 2014, came to the company's San Francisco headquarters the following August as struggles were mounting. Employees wanted changes. "We both heard it," said Danny Rimer, the Index partner who led the seed funding, referring to conversations he and Lilly were having with staffers about Field. "We sat down with him and explained to him the situation," Rimer said. "We heard it and we sort of said, 'Look, this is an impasse. You're going to have to adapt and change.' And he heard it and he changed. I think that's such a great character trait of Dylan, is to hear the information, be objective about it, process it and accept it and act accordingly, if it makes sense."
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup's Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022. Figma
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