Back in 2012 when Dylan Field was a student at Brown University, he came up with the idea of building a browser-based design tool. At the time, design tools were all on the desktop, which meant that designers worked alone, sending files for review to the various stakeholders involved, then making changes based on feedback in a rather inefficient non-digital loop.
Field and co-founder Evan Wallace launched Figma to completely alter the design paradigm, one where instead of printouts traveling back and forth between reviewers and designers, everyone could work in the same tool together.
It was not unlike Google Docs, allowing multiple people to work on the same file at the same time, leaving comments and generally interacting and collaborating with each other on the web. The problem was that web technology in 2012 wasn’t really ready to enable this kind of design functionality and deliver it in real time to multiple users. Design is far more complex than a text document.
What’s more, designers seemed to like being in control of their tool and having the stakeholders come to them. Even after Figma overcame all of the technical hurdles to deliver a viable working product, it had to overcome user resistance to this approach — even though it seems like the most sensible approach in the world today.
It took until 2017 for Field and Wallace to bring a product to market to the point where they could start collecting revenue, yet their investors remained patient, recognizing that revolutionary ideas sometimes take time to bake.
It was worth the wait. By June 2021, the company collected a $200 million investment on a $10 billion valuation, and then in September 2022, Adobe announced its intention to buy the company for double that. The deal has run into regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe and remains in limbo for now, but the story of how it got to this point as a $20 billion company, overcoming countless technical hurdles, while tenacious investors stood by, is a compelling one.
Lots of doubts
When you look back 10 years, it might as well be a lifetime ago when it comes to how much browser technology has advanced in that time. Perhaps that’s why most people thought that what Field and Wallace were trying to do would be nigh impossible.
Kris Rasmussen, who is currently the CTO at Figma, spoke with Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann at Netlify’s user conference last year. Biilmann’s company brought to the world the Jamstack concept, which is basically using the browser to deliver applications. He was almost in awe of what Figma was able to achieve with the browser technology available when it started.
“I’m sure 10 years ago, if I told designers that you’re going to replace all your heavy desktop apps with just going through a URL in a browser, they would not even have believed me,” Biilmann said at the time.
Rasmussen, who joined the company as an engineering contractor shortly before the company released the first version of the product to the public, still has a pretty deep understanding of what it took to get to that 1.0 delivery. “Figma piqued my interest just because they were doing some pretty innovative things on the web and in solving some really interesting technical challenges,” Rasmussen told TechCrunch+.
Prior to connecting with Figma, he had been working on web technologies for some time and recognized the challenges that Figma faced. “I have a lot of experience working on the web and building tools on the web to help people work more effectively together. And so I’ve also witnessed firsthand some of the limitations of the web in the past,” he said.
Maybe that’s why early on even he was skeptical that Figma could deliver. “Figma really was the first company to prove me wrong, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to work with them,” he said. “I got to try the product, and I was like, wow, this is actually legitimate, this is as fast as a native application. And so I joined the team both to help them, but also to learn kind of what went into that first four years of development.”
Good things take time
Even while Figma was trying to convince technical people it could deliver a design tool in the browser, there were investors who were giving the company cash to figure out how to overcome the technical hurdles it was facing.
Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, the firm that wrote Figma’s first check, says that he met Field when he was a 19-year-old intern working at Flipboard. Even then, he knew he wanted to found a company, and when he and Wallace came up with the idea for Figma, Rimer was ready to invest.
“Their casual conversations around the capabilities of nascent WebGL quickly formed into visions of incredible possibility. If tools for designers could be built on the web, then could a whole world founded on collaboration and community power an entirely new design process? Dylan and Evan felt the answer was undoubtedly yes, and the idea for Figma was born,” Rimer told TechCrunch+.
Rimer wasn’t the only one who believed in their vision. John Lilly, who invested at the Series A round but was in conversation with Field for a couple of years before he invested, says that he, too, was willing to wait it out, even though users were not enamored with the idea of collaborative design early on.
“With Figma, it was more like, we knew that this thing was possible to do, and we knew that we could probably get about as good as the tools that existed for designers,” Lilly said. “But we also knew that if we could do this then it would change the way people work because it was going to be collaborative in ways that it never was before — and we thought people might hate that, and they really hated it at first.”
Eventually, though, designers would grow to love it and were very much underwhelmed by the Adobe acquisition.
Getting to market
Even though it took so long to make it happen, there was a confidence that the company could get there. That’s in large part because of Wallace’s creative and technical prowess to bend the browser to meet the requirements, even before the tooling was mature enough to do what they were trying to do.
“I think there definitely was a level of confidence within the team that you didn’t see outside of the team for people who hadn’t really experienced Figma yet,” Rasmussen said. “And I think everyone was just insanely impressed with the groundwork and technology that Evan had laid in the early days. I think the thing that made Figma possible was this sort of shift in terms of the way browsers were approaching their API development.”
The browser was originally created as a container for text and images, and it wasn’t designed as a way to run complex software. Even as developers started making use of JavaScript, there were still a lot of technical hurdles that Figma had to overcome to make it work.
“I think browsers have done incredible things with the kind of primary use cases that they’re targeting. I think Figma is an example of a use case that hadn’t historically been really dominant on the web. And it was the introduction of these lower level APIs, you can call them tools, that browsers started to adopt, that made it possible for us to build a design-rich application on the web with the performance of the native desktop application,” Rasmussen said.
And the browser technology eventually caught up with the vision, giving the team confidence that it could build a native-like experience that actually ran on the web. New standards and tech meant they could build almost in exactly the same way they would build natively, but run in the browser sandbox.
But the engineering team also got creative when it needed to. “One of the things unique about our application, and one of the reasons why it feels so performant, is that we wrote our own rendering technology using this lower-level WebGL API,” Rasmussen said. “And this enabled us to make optimizations that the browsers themselves didn’t think were appropriate for our use case.”
Rimer insists that even today, he would again invest in a company like Figma that took so long to get from idea to market, precisely because of what he learned working with Figma all these years. He says it is not always a straight line, but good ideas are worth the wait.
“It is always about the founders and the problem they want to solve. We will continue to invest early, and in line with Index’s ethos: building deep, meaningful relationships with unconventional founders from their early days, and partnering with them through the peaks and valleys of their journeys to build an iconic business.”