Today’s IPO is a landmark moment for Figma — not just a financial milestone, but a powerful validation of Dylan and Evan’s founding vision back in 2012: to “eliminate the gap between imagination and reality.”
Figma’s relentless focus on product, community, and craft has reshaped how the world designs. What began as a bold technical challenge — building a web-based design tool that felt native — evolved into a platform that helps millions of creators design and build together.
In a 2003 interview about the iPod, Steve Jobs famously said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Figma is built around this idea, building tools so that designers of all kinds come together not just to make things beautiful, but to make them work better.
And now, we’re standing at the threshold of a new era — one defined by the rise of artificial intelligence. It’s an especially important moment to ask: what does the future of design look like?
Design has always existed in the space between tools and human intention. As Mitch Kapor wrote in his 1990 Software Design Manifesto: “What is design? It’s where you stand with a foot in two worlds — the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes — and you try to bring the two together.”
35 years later that’s still the clearest expression I know of what great design strives to do. And it’s what Figma enables: a connection — between imagination and reality, and between the systems we build and the people we build them for, between our machines and ourselves.
On a personal level, too, this is a significant moment for me. I was lucky early in my career to be mentored by some of the best thinkers & designers in the world: Terry Winograd & David Kelley at Stanford; later Mitch Kapor & many others. And from the very first time I set foot in Figma’s offices, I felt like I’d come home: Dylan & Evan had built a temple to design — with typography books scattered around — but the whole company culture was infused with a belief in, and reverence for, designers and their work. And that’s still the core value of Figma today.
One of the other things that Mitch said to me about entrepreneurship is that “you’ve got to build a house you want to live in.” In other words: build organizations that can help create the world you want. By elevating and empowering designers, Figma’s done that in a profound and lasting way.
Here’s to the team at Figma, and to continuing to build the world of designing together.
