Dylan Discipline, co-founder and CEO of Figma, indicators the guestbook on the ground of the New York Inventory Trade in New York on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Pictures
Mark Zuckerberg stands out as the most well-known college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Discipline is the most recent, after his design startup Figma soared in its inventory market debut this week.
The 2 entrepreneurs have one thing else in widespread: shut ties to Peter Thiel.
Zuckerberg received his first outdoors test for Fb from Thiel in 2004, quickly earlier than leaving Harvard College to construct his social community in Silicon Valley. Fb went public in 2012, the identical 12 months that Discipline scored a Thiel Fellowship, which supplies cash “to younger individuals who wish to construct new issues as a substitute of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 folks have been chosen since its inception in 2011.
Discipline, now 33, was a part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a bunch of 20 entrepreneurs who every took residence $100,000. This system doubled that sum earlier this 12 months. Like Zuckerberg, Discipline got here to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown College in Windfall, Rhode Island.
On Thursday, Figma’s inventory worth greater than tripled in its first day of buying and selling on the New York Inventory Trade. It rose once more on Friday, wrapping up the week with a totally diluted market cap above $71 billion. Discipline’s stake is price about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, in the meantime, is now the world’s third-richest particular person, with a web price of over $260 billion.
Whereas the contours of Discipline’s story could sound acquainted, he is a really totally different sort of character.
“Dylan is, by far, essentially the most humble billionaire I’ve ever met,” stated Joshua Browder, CEO of authorized providers startup DoNotPay and a former Thiel fellow.
Mike Gibson, who used to assist run the fellows program as vice chairman for grants on the nonprofit Thiel Basis, contrasts Discipline with one other tech luminary.
“He is sort of just like the anti-Steve Jobs,” stated Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a enterprise agency that prides itself on investing in dropouts. “In relation to Jobs’ legend as this hard-charging a–hole, Dylan is the alternative.”
The Apple co-founder, who dropped out of school after one semester, died of most cancers in 2011, as his firm was on its strategy to turning into essentially the most priceless enterprise on this planet.
Discipline was poised to formally enter the billionaire ranks virtually three years in the past. With Figma having emerged as a frontrunner in web-based instruments for designing apps and web sites, Adobe agreed to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. However regulators within the U.Okay. stated the tie-up would’ve damage competitors, and the businesses scrapped the transaction in late 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup payment.
Figma’s IPO this week represented not solely an enormous valuation markup for the corporate but additionally served as a banner occasion for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs for the reason that market cratered in early 2022 as a consequence of hovering inflation and rising rates of interest.
“An important factor to remind myself of, the crew of, is share worth is a second in time,” Discipline instructed CNBC’s “Squawk Field” on Thursday. “We will see all kinds of habits most likely as we speak, over the weeks forward.”
Figma declined to make Discipline out there for an interview for this story.
Discipline’s trek again to the Bay Space, the place he’d grown up, started with a TechCrunch article concerning the fellowship. He submitted his utility two hours earlier than the deadline, on New 12 months’s Eve of 2011, whereas he was a junior at Brown. He overlooked his SAT scores.
“It’s my perception that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and may simply be gamed,” he wrote in his utility, which he posted on LinkedIn years later. Within the essay part, he was requested to supply a extremely controversial take.
“Chocolate is repulsive,” he wrote. “Even the scent of it makes me wish to vomit.”
In response to a query about how he was going to vary the world, Discipline stated he was going to construct higher software program for drones, and that he would “cofound an organization with the neatest programmer I do know and work on this downside.”
That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a instructing assistant for a few of Discipline’s programs at Brown. Wallace was technologically gifted, incomes the nickname “laptop Jesus,” or CJ. However he was already 20, that means he was too previous to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship.
Discipline scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to depart his tutorial pursuits. The pair moved right into a small condo in Palo Alto, California.
The drone software program plan had gone out the window. Wallace needed to develop one thing associated to WebGL, a graphics rendering system for net browsers. A 12 months later, they had been exhibiting buyers a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the motion of a ball in a pool of water.
‘Anybody could be artistic’
The apparent aggressive goal was Adobe, which was ending improvement of Fireworks, an app design product that it acquired with the 2005 Macromedia buy.
“We thought, ‘Wait, possibly there’s a possibility right here,'” Discipline stated on a podcast earlier this 12 months.
“What we’re making an attempt to do is make it in order that anybody could be artistic, by creating free, easy artistic instruments within the browser,” Discipline stated in a 2012 interview for a CNBC particular on the Thiel Fellowship.
In 2013, the founders began speaking with buyers about elevating a seed spherical. Discipline confirmed the pool water demo to John Lilly of Greylock Companions at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had beforehand been CEO of Mozilla, the place an engineer developed software program that led to WebGL. He was impressed with what he was seeing, however he did not suppose it had a lot financial potential.
Figma took on seed funding from Index Ventures and different buyers. The founders assembled a small group of workers at an workplace in Palo Alto. Progress was gradual. Early variations of the product didn’t impress potential customers. Discipline was micromanaging.
When Figma would present the product to firms within the Bay Space, reception wasn’t all the time nice. Stress was constructing. Lilly, who ended up main Figma’s Sequence A spherical in 2014, got here to the corporate’s San Francisco headquarters the next August as struggles had been mounting. Workers needed adjustments.
“We each heard it,” stated Danny Rimer, the Index associate who led the seed funding, referring to conversations he and Lilly had been having with staffers about Discipline.
“We sat down with him and defined to him the state of affairs,” Rimer stated. “We heard it and we kind of stated, ‘Look, that is an deadlock. You are going to must adapt and alter.’ And he heard it and he modified. I feel that is such a fantastic character trait of Dylan, is to listen to the data, be goal about it, course of it and settle for it and act accordingly, if it is smart.”
Dylan Discipline, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks on the startup’s Config convention in San Francisco on Might 10, 2022.
Figma
Round that point, Sho Kuwamoto joined the corporate. Kuwamoto introduced with him expertise from Macromedia and Adobe. 4 months later, Figma launched its debut product in a free preview.
Discipline received concerned with customers. He replied to folks on social media who had been posting about Figma, telling them they had been receiving entry to the preview. He additionally sought out outstanding designers.
Corporations like Coda and Uber grew to become early adopters. Some designers had been excited by the concept of sharing paperwork by copying and pasting a URL, as a substitute of getting to cope with variations, codecs and updates. Figma operated within the cloud, offering all the mandatory computing infrastructure, so customers did not want their very own highly effective graphics playing cards.
It wasn’t till September 2016 that Figma made the design editor out there without spending a dime to most people and made it attainable for a number of designers to make adjustments in a single file concurrently. That grew to become the killer function.
The software program began gaining traction inside Microsoft. However there was a problem. Microsoft feared that Figma’s lack of a transparent enterprise mannequin may result in a burial within the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design govt on the software program large, visited Figma’s headquarters to ship the message, Discipline instructed CNBC in 2022.
“Look, we’re all apprehensive you are going to die as an organization,” Discipline recalled Friedman telling him.
The next 12 months, Figma launched its first paid tier.
By the point enterprise stalwart Sequoia Capital got here on board in 2019, Figma was a sizzling commodity, elevating its Sequence C spherical at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia associate Andrew Reed stated a few of his agency’s portfolio firms had began migrating to Figma, and founders had been utilizing it for pitch decks.
“Corporations usually will present prototypes in board conferences of latest merchandise they wish to construct, and so the very first thing we noticed a whole lot of Figma hyperlinks for was that,” Reed stated in an interview this week.
“It was a very simple funding,” Reed stated. “We went by way of a few of our previous funding voting knowledge. I feel Figma may need been the best vote we ever had for an funding.”
Sequoia’s intensive roster of winners over the many years contains Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Zoom and WhatsApp.
The Adobe interval
Monetary analysts protecting Adobe began asking about Figma. Adobe, which had launched the XD app for consumer expertise design, responded, including the startup to its official listing of rivals.
However Adobe’s market capitalization sat above $170 billion, and Figma wasn’t even a “unicorn,” a standing reserved for startups price no less than $1 billion. Discipline instructed Forbes that some job candidates had been hesitant to hitch due to the modest valuation. In 2020, the corporate raised a funding spherical from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.
Then got here Covid. Workplaces closed. The world went distant in a single day. Figma’s collaboration functionality abruptly grew to become important to the way in which many extra folks labored.
“We requested ourselves: how can we assist groups join, have enjoyable and enter a circulate state through the earliest levels of the design course of?” Discipline later wrote on Twitter.
The end result was FigJam, a digital whiteboard that grew to become Figma’s second product, and represented a key step towards diversification.
The Adobe noise continued to get louder. In 2020, Discipline had discussions with Adobe govt Scott Belsky a couple of partnership or acquisition, however Discipline selected to remain the course. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Discipline a couple of attainable deal in early 2021, however once more the Figma CEO demurred, opting to lift a spherical at a $10 billion valuation.
“Our aim is to be Figma not Adobe,” Discipline wrote in a 2021 tweet.
The setting shortly modified. By early 2022, with the Fed lifting rates of interest to battle inflation, buyers had been promoting out of high-growth tech and rotating into companies with predictable earnings. Sequoia was encouraging its startups to cut back prices.
David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s MAX convention in Los Angeles, October 2022.
Adobe
Belsky once more approached Discipline in April of that 12 months, this time alongside David Wadhwani, who was main Adobe’s digital media enterprise.
“Mr. Discipline expressed openness to understanding the phrases of a possible acquisition of Figma by Adobe, and Mr. Discipline, Mr. Belsky and Mr. Wadhwani continued their dialogue of the potential advantages of a mix the next week,” Adobe acknowledged in a regulatory submitting.
Discipline was contemplating the implications of the rise of synthetic intelligence.
“Look, after we did the cope with Adobe within the first place, my head area in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. That is clearly exponential as a know-how. I do not know what this does to us. Is that this one-tenth our market, is it 10x our market? What does it imply for creatives and designers?” Discipline stated in an interview with The Verge final 12 months. “And I used to be like, it is higher to crew up on this world with Adobe and to navigate this collectively and to determine this out collectively than it’s to go it alone.”
In September 2022, Adobe agreed to purchase Figma for about $20 billion, saying that Discipline would stay answerable for his a part of the enterprise and would report back to Wadhwani.
“Adobe has a novel alternative to usher in a world of collaborative creativity,” Narayen instructed analysts on a convention name the day of the settlement. “In my conversations with Dylan at Figma, it grew to become abundantly clear that collectively we may speed up this new imaginative and prescient, delivering nice worth to our prospects and shareholders.”
That chance by no means got here. An intensifying regulatory setting within the U.S. and Europe had made sizable tech offers extra burdensome. Adobe was abruptly within the crosshairs, and the transaction was hitting repeated hurdles.
“We’re apprehensive this deal may stifle innovation and result in greater prices for firms that depend on Figma and Adobe’s digital instruments — as they stop to compete to supply prospects with new and higher merchandise,” Sorcha O’Carroll, an official on the U.Okay. Competitors and Markets Authority, stated in a press launch in mid-2023.
Round that point, Discipline introduced one other step towards product diversification by introducing Dev Mode, which turns Figma designs into supply code that may function a place to begin for software program builders. The reveal got here at Figma’s Config consumer convention in San Francisco, which attracted 8,000 attendees.
The U.Okay.’s investigation dragged on for months. Discipline was pulling double obligation operating the corporate and interesting with regulators. Adobe had stated it anticipated to finish the deal in 2023, however time was operating out. Regulators had been proposing treatments that the events did not like.
“Even towards the ultimate months, there have been these moments of, ‘Oh, that is going to undergo,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Discipline instructed The Verge. “And clearly on the finish, there is a mutual understanding of,’ This resolution has been made for us and let’s name it.'”
On a Sunday in December 2023, Discipline gathered board members for a 10-minute name, informing them that the deal was off. The official assertion adopted early on Monday morning.
“It is irritating and unhappy that we’re not in a position to full this,” Discipline instructed The New York Occasions.
Not everybody in Discipline’s orbit noticed it that means. Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra, a buddy of Discipline’s and longtime Figma consumer, stated the entire ordeal was having an affect.
“You possibly can see it in his face,” Mehrotra stated of Discipline, including that he was relieved when he discovered Figma would stay unbiased. “He was getting older proper in entrance of us.”
However Figma had some enterprise considerations. Its web greenback retention charge, a measurement of the corporate’s skill to promote extra to current prospects, slid from 159% within the first quarter of 2023 to 122% by the top of the 12 months, based on Figma’s IPO prospectus. Figma chalked it as much as a troublesome comparability from the 12 months earlier than, due to the launch of FigJam, and financial uncertainty that induced some shoppers to cut back seat counts. The retention charge bounced again to 132% within the first quarter of 2025.
In the course of the 2023 winter holidays, Discipline thought-about methods to rally the workforce. After the brand new 12 months, he introduced internally that Figma would give additional fairness to workers who joined or acquired promotions following the acquisition announcement, as a result of the valuation was going again right down to $10 billion. He stated any workers who wished to depart would get three months of severance, with no laborious emotions.
Fewer than 5% of staffers took him up on the provide.
Pivot to prompting
As Figma pursues a go-it-alone technique, it faces an existential query: Is the corporate prepared for a future dominated by AI?
In Might, Discipline took the stage at Figma’s consumer convention earlier than 8,500 attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Heart, carrying a black “Config 2025” T-shirt. He walked the group by way of a slew of latest merchandise, together with Figma Make, which pulls on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a big language mannequin from AI startup Anthropic.
“With Figma Make, you possibly can take an current design and immediate your strategy to a totally coded prototype,” Discipline stated.
A product supervisor, Holly Li, got here up for a demo. At a laptop computer, she copied the design for a music participant within the Figma editor and pasted it right into a chat field, typing directions to rotate the album artwork like a report whereas a tune is enjoying. She confirmed apps created with Figma Make, eliciting some cheers, and returned to the demo.
“Okay. This time, the mannequin had just a little little bit of issue, however that is okay,” she stated. The cloudy background picture from the unique design was gone, and monitor names grew to become troublesome to learn. The group was silent. She introduced up a working model in a special browser tab.
The function went dwell final week. Mehrotra stated it is off to a superb begin.
Different merchandise available in the market had been constructed with generative AI in thoughts. They embrace Lovable, Miro’s Uizard and Vercel’s v0. Brent Stewart, an analyst at Gartner, stated that Figma is “completely, completely dominant” in design however that a number of the choices from different firms look extra spectacular.
Andrew Chan, a former Figma software program engineer, wrote in a weblog submit final 12 months that “an fascinating and ongoing query is whether or not Figma can repeat the success it had in design with different merchandise.”
Nadia Eldeib, a former Lyft product supervisor and CEO of startup CodeYam, tried Figma Make earlier than the broad launch and put it up towards Lovable and v0. Writing on Substack, she stated it gave the impression to be at an earlier stage.
It is the kind of suggestions that Discipline will learn and ship to his workers, referred to as Figmates. He reads help tickets and mentions of Figma’s identify on X, previously Twitter. He took no day without work to handle such issues on the very day that his firm was conducting its IPO, finally pricing shares $1 above the anticipated vary.
Yianni Mathioudakis, a artistic director in Maryland, tagged Figma in a submit on Wednesday, asking if anybody had discovered a strategy to take a Figma Make design and produce it into the principle design editor.
“Hello Yianni, we’re working in the direction of this and really enthusiastic about what it would unlock!” Discipline replied. “Please maintain the Make suggestions coming!”
