Will Griffith had only been two months in his job as a venture investor for Iconiq when he met a 19-year-old college dropout named Dylan Field. This would lead to one of his signature seed investments, in a startup called Figma.
On Thursday, Figma went public with the stock popping from the $33 IPO opening price to close at $115.50 and a $47 billion market cap. And Griffith could not be more effusive in his praise for the company.
“You go to one of these user conferences and you’re like, there’s 15,000 people here and 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith smiled. From the earliest days, the founders of this company that offers software for designers had “a fervent desire to win and deliver and redefine this ecosystem.”
Yet in 2013 at that first meeting, co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were untested. And at that point, so was Iconiq. It was known then as the very secretive wealth management firm for many of Silicon Valley’s richest tech moguls, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Figma, however, already had a champion: Field had been an intern at LinkedIn under its then CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner was an angel investor (and bought more stock at later rounds, too) and introduced Field to Griffith.
“We got connected to Figma before we had an early fund, before we had any venture fund,” Griffith told TechCrunch. The investor remembers trekking out to meet the founders. “It was like two guys and the dog in an apartment in Palo Alto, and they were working on these newfangled graphics and design capability in a browser.”
The demo showed how light could be manipulated when editing a photo in a browser. At the time, browser-based design software, based on WebGL, was revolutionary. Tech giant Adobe had the graphics design market locked up with its desktop software. “I thought it was insane,” Griffith recalled.
The idea was so unproven Alexis Ohanian, who was investing out of his then firm Initialized, passed on Figma when he saw the product years later in 2016, he noted in a tweet this week. Ohanian called Figma a member of his “embarrassing miss-list.”
But Griffith wrote a check. Seed shares, by the way, were priced at $0.0878 each, Figma disclosed in its S-1A. And Griffith wrote more checks as Figma raised additional rounds. The company raised a total of about $332 million in venture funding through 2024, PitchBook estimates.
“We invested in the seed. We invested in the Series A. We invested further. We did some secondary and we also invested more meaningfully a year ago,” Griffith said.
Iconiq did not wind up owning at least 5% of the company, a bar that would require Figma to publicly disclose the size of its stake. But it owns enough that the IPO will be celebrated at the Iconiq offices.
“One of the ways that we celebrate is we guess what the closing day stock price is going to be on the first day. It’s a prediction contest around the firm,” Griffith said. “There are some good prizes and rewards.” If someone nails that number, they could wind up with a healthy cash bonus or even something like a trip to Hawaii.
As for the odd part of this IPO, Griffith has some insight. Most of the stock sold was from investors’ stakes, including Field’s, rather than new shares issued by the company, the company said.
“I think it’s very generous that existing investors are willing to sell as much to create enough supply for this IPO,” he said.
Figma’s fundamentals are so solid that the IPO was 40 times oversubscribed, according to Bloomberg, meaning far more investors wanted shares than the supply available.
That can be almost as problematic as investor disinterest, Griffith explained. The largest institutional investors won’t bother with an IPO where they can’t trade hundreds of millions’ worth of shares, he said. And if an IPO doesn’t float enough shares, prices of available shares could become artificially inflated, meaning the company won’t be properly valued. Should prices decline after opening day, the company could be artificially devalued as well.
Figma’s existing shareholders didn’t really want to sell shares at $33, Griffith said. “We have been with this business since 2015, and we haven’t sold a share. And we are going to be meaningful buyers in the IPO,” he said.
Still, Griffith emphasized that for Figma, IPO day is just a milestone and not an end. “I met a young, 19-year-old Dylan, and we forged a partnership,” he said. He describes himself as “proud” of seeing Field, Figma’s CEO, “continue to just mature and grow, but have the same vision, morals, authenticity.“
In the meantime, he says he’ll be spending Figma’s IPO day “meeting with the next generation of founders.”