innovation secrets

Founded in 2012 when Field dropped out of college to become a Thiel fellow and his cofounder and classmate, Evan Wallace, graduated from Brown, Figma officially launched in 2016 as a tool to help software designers work together in the same web browser simultaneously. (Both Field and Wallace have separately made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2015 and 2017; Figma appeared on the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startups list last July.) Figma’s design templates and collaboration tools have proven a hit with its local tech company peers, counting Airbnb, Slack, Twitter and Uber as users. Outside of the Bay Area, Figma’s now in use at Microsoft, Volvo and Walgreen’s per its company website. As of the end of 2019, more than 80% of Figma’s active users were outside the U.S., the company has said. It had 150 employees at the start of the year.
Always drop outs of college innovate 

Figma joins a select group of business software apps to follow that playbook in recent weeks, including collaboration toolmaker Notion, which also recently reached a $2 billion valuation off a relatively small amount of capital raised, as well as Coder, which just announced new funding at a valuation of $200 million. And it’s unlikely to be the last startup with healthy prospects to accept such a safety net, either. Still, reaching such a “unicorn” valuation will prove a major milestone for Field, not yet 30 and at the helm of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest software businesses.