The first unicorn to open the on-chain IPO channel, Figma's aesthetics stand out in Silicon Valley

Source: Dongcha Beating

On July 31, the Silicon Valley design software giant will officially list on the New York Stock Exchange, co-managed by top investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company, and JPMorgan Chase, making it one of the most anticipated tech IPOs of 2025.

In the IPO prospectus submitted by Figma, one sentence caught our attention: the company has been authorized to issue "Blockchain Common Stock." This is the first of its kind globally.

In fact, this is not Figma's first intersection with the crypto world. Previously, they had included BTC ETFs on their balance sheet. Moreover, Figma's founder, Dylan Field, is one of the few Web 2 entrepreneurs who paid attention to crypto trends early on. Therefore, this is not an opportunistic attempt but rather an expression of long-term optimism towards crypto.

The world's leading companies are proving through action that they are gradually embracing crypto technology. We should not underestimate this change. We want to re-examine this company from a more unique perspective: not only its valuation and growth curve but also its product philosophy and capital structure design.

And all of this revolves around one person—Dylan Field.

Who is Dylan Field?

In Silicon Valley, almost every sufficiently successful founder must learn one thing: Becoming the Face of your company.

That is a face that knows when to speak and when to be silent; a face accustomed to the media spotlight; a face that can say to the camera, "We are changing the world." People’s familiarity with this face sometimes even surpasses their memory of the products he founded.

Dylan Field does not belong to this category.

At first glance, it is hard to associate him with "Figma founder."

He is slightly overweight, dresses casually, and used to have slightly long curly hair, resembling Leonard from "The Big Bang Theory" when he takes off his glasses.

He actually used to be an actor.

The first time he stood on stage was at the age of five. It was in an unremarkable small theater in California, a venue converted from an old church, with lights flickering and the backdrop often falling to the ground. He was not chosen for his looks but because he "could sit quietly and recognized words."

In the following years, he intermittently took on various performances, had his own agent in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and even appeared in commercials for eToys and Windows XP.

His "acting career" came early and ended early, but it subtly influenced his life.

While other kids saw the stage as a starting point to stardom, Dylan remembered how everyone would tacitly change positions, move, and exchange lines during rehearsals. He said that was the first time he experienced "the power of collaboration," not based on how well one person performed but whether everyone could be in sync in the same space to complete a performance.

This hidden thread has run through his life ever since.

In high school, he began to dabble in programming, using Dreamweaver to help friends create web pages. He was not like those teenage prodigies in Silicon Valley who created apps at a young age, nor did he write blogs about "how to create a hit product in three days." Later, he attended Brown University, where he considered other career paths, took some political science courses, contemplated a legal career, and even thought about returning to acting.

In his junior year, he met Evan Wallace, who would become another co-founder of Figma.

Wallace was his classmate, a WebGL geek who created a browser rendering demo called Water, where the water rippled smoothly and naturally, which WIRED called "one of the most impressive WebGL demos."

Dylan was shocked. But what attracted him was not the visuals but the underlying logic: if graphics could be seamlessly rendered in a browser, could design also be done in a browser? Could collaboration also happen?

What came to his mind was the feeling he had during drama rehearsals—one step forward, one beat in response. Could design be like a performance, where there was no need to transfer files or compare application versions, but rather, several cursors responding to each other on one page, flowing like rehearsals and performances?

In an era when everyone was talking about growth hacking, hit formulas, and viral marketing, this narrative sounded too "non-Silicon Valley."

However, years later, Figma became a collaboration platform valued at over a hundred billion dollars and eventually stepped onto the IPO stage.

In an era that encourages bold bets and narrative-driven approaches, why was it Dylan Field who brought Figma to be the last one standing?

An Entrepreneur Away from the Trend

Let's rewind to 2012, when Dylan Field received the "Thiel Fellowship," established by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, becoming one of the 20 "young people allowed to drop out" that year.

At the age of 20, he dropped out of Brown University, rented a studio in Silicon Valley with the $100,000 prize money, and prepared to start a business. However, at that time, he still did not know what to do.

This does not mean he had no ideas; rather, his ideas at the time were not very feasible. Drone traffic monitoring, graphic editing, animation generation… During that period, he could only try and guess, attempting to figure out what he was truly good at and searching for a direction that could actually work.

Dylan rarely mentions these failures. He is not the type to turn failures into turning points, nor is he interested in packaging early chaos as a "necessary path to growth." He simply noted the problems and continued moving forward.

There was one thing he never let go of: could the browser platform support more complex collaborative behaviors?

That was the thought he planted during his internship at Flipboard. During the internship, he first felt that the interface on the screen could be as smooth and elegant as a paper magazine. After that, he began to ponder: since the reading experience could be redesigned, could the collaboration experience also be redesigned?

That was not a popular direction. In those years, the trend was in mobile, with the App Store exploding, ride-hailing wars heating up, and growth hacking becoming a buzzword among investors. The browser seemed outdated, and "collaboration" was not a term that could tell a high-valuation story.

He did not chase trends but instead dug deep into "collaborative experience": could the logic of how people work together also be brought into the browser? Could it be designed like a system?

Although their direction was not finalized at that time, after numerous discussions and trial-and-error, the term "collaboration" had already become the logical starting point for their entrepreneurship, with all ideas revolving around "collaboration." It felt like returning to the theater of childhood performances, where everyone was in the same space, stepping on the same rhythm to complete a performance.

They gradually tightened their focus and began to build Figma's framework step by step around the three points of "browser + real-time collaboration + UI design."

Dylan is not the type of person who could see the "endgame" early on. He did not shout about interstellar plans from Day 1 like Elon Musk, nor did he draw "closed-loop" ecosystems in decks like many entrepreneurs. He was more like someone doodling lines in the center of a blank page, only to discover that these lines formed a treasure map.

Another interesting coincidence is that two years after Dylan received the Thiel Fellowship, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin also received the Thiel Fellowship.

Vitalik went on-chain to redesign protocols; Dylan stayed in the browser to redefine collaboration. Two system thinkers entered the digital world from different angles, trying to answer the ancient question in different ways: how do we work together?

But Dylan did not make a sensational debut like Vitalik.

He did not have a stunning theory, nor did he stand on any trend. He simply thought about one question: why can't design software collaborate like the Web? Why do we still rely on files, version numbers, and sending things back and forth? Why has no one changed this?

These questions are not sexy, do not tell a good story, and are hard to pitch to investors. But he felt that someone had to solve them. This was the reason he stayed, and the reason Figma was born.