Figma IPO

Last week, Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Earlier this year, I was convinced that I was going to quit. In fact I was actively looking for jobs for a time. The team I was on, mobile editor, had been disbanded, and the Figma for iPad app was effectively put on maintenance mode for the forseeable future. I was shuffled on and off multiple teams in the following months. From mobile editor to FigJam, to Buzz (then called Lite), to Slides, and then back to Buzz. I had whiplash from onboarding and offboarding every few weeks, and every time I met with my manager I was told something different about the priorities of the company and staffing needs.

And once I was on Buzz, things did not seem to improve. As a new Figma product, there was an incredible amount of thrash. I worked on two different workstreams for months that were scrapped. We went through four different project managers before the product had even shipped. Despite that, expectations were higher than ever. I was under a lot of pressure to code features, my manager was under a lot of pressure to decide which features to build, and leadership was under a lot of pressure to get this big bet to pan out financially for the company. I had gone from a team with little executive support (and oversight), to one with a large spotlight shining on us from across the company.

I felt overworked, undervalued, and worried that it would all amount to nothing, No promotion, no product launch, and nothing to show for nearly a year of my life. Figmas engineering culture is extremely fixated on shipping features, and I did not have the energy to work on another project that would get cancelled in two months.

This is a far cry from what I felt when I got my internship at Figma. I had been beyond excited when I got my offer in 2020, in the throughs of the pandemic. Here was a place that had it all:

• A mission that I truly believed in: Accessible and collaborative design makes the world a better place for everyone. I’d loved web design since I was 14 and already fell in love with Figma as a user.
• Experimental technology: Figma was at the forefront of web technologies. They used WebAssembly, Rust, and reinvented what seemed possible in a web browser.
• Explosive growth: Maybe a bit bigger than I would have wanted at 300+ people, but people loved Figma and numbers were all up and to the right and they were the buisness horizontally with new products and vertically by adding tons of requested features.

And at this point I felt like I’ve grown into Adulthood during my time at Figma. It was my first full-time job after College in the big city! I probably spent nearly as much time in the New York Figma office than I had at my tiny east village apartment. Some of my coworkers had become my best friends in an unfamiliar city, and I’ve been there on my highest days and my lowest. The stability it’s given me, the status (oh cool you work at Figma?!) and the paychecks have enabled a lot of the life I’ve lived in the past 4 years.

That’s why, when I got into grad school and found out it would require a large amount of willpower and sacrifice to do both school and work - I still hesitated to leave. I had a conversation with a coworker about quitting and he told me that they wanted to stay at least until an IPO - which seemed to be less than a year away. “I figure I might only get to experience a big IPO like this once, maybe twice in my career at a place that I’ve spent a long time at.” This more than anything else convinced me to stay, as the FOMO from the celebration of a large IPO weighed on my mind heavily. This was despite the fact that most other engineers told me an IPO was nothing special and nothing more than another stale corporate party.

After that conversation however, our work on Buzz finally started clicking. I became lead on a workstream that wasn’t going to be cancelled (bulk create!). We sprinted full speed towards a launch at Config - Figma’s annual design conference. Designs solidified and priorities aligned across the whole team. Once we launched, people internal and external to Figma loved my feature, and our team finally had some time to ease off the gas. I was finally starting to feel like I had the year before - a valued member of a team building a cool and useful tool. I decided to stay at Figma, and made plans with my manager to attend school at the same time.

IPO Day

Despite the S1 filing, rumors and speculations by financial institutions, listing day still seemingly came out of nowhere. We were informed on July 21st that the IPO was happening in only 10 days. This was during my summer intensive at NYU at which time I was struggling to balance school, work, and sleep. I was working every night and every weekend on both Figma and homework, and getting every second of sleep I could where I could. But for this, I set my alarm early and skipped my morning class.

The day started early. Figma’s CEO, Dylan Field, rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange at exactly 9:30am on Thursday - which meant the celebrations started at 8:00. Figma rented out the event space beneath the office. I was so used to seeing it being used for product launches and popups throughout the years that it was crazy to be in there with hundreds of coworkers, toasting and ringing our tiny figma bells in time with the livestream.

The room was packed.

Afterwards, we went back upstairs to chill out for a bit, eat lunch, and in my case, approve a pull request. While I was chatting with coworkers, we saw a giant banner being unfurled across 23rd street, organized by our neighbors at the payment company Ramp. While it might seem a bit corporate cringe, it was genuinely heartwarming to see the employees there happy for us. For nearly the past three years, I had watched them across the street, and seen them looking back. We were happy, and they were happy that we were happy. Maybe there’s some big PR or marketing strategy behind it, but in that moment it was completely unexpected and a welcome gesture of friendship.

Congrats Figma, from your friends at Ramp

After that, we took the train down to Wall Street to see the excitement up close and in person. It was even wilder than I expected. There was a DJ, a large interactive digital art piece, and free food and swag being offered to nonplussed European tourists on holiday. I saw coworkers and ex-coworkers coming from across the city and across the country to be on the floor of the stock exchange, or even to just enjoy the festivities outside on the cobble streets. Finance workers came by to see the fuss and tell us that this was unlike any IPO they had ever seen.

And then came the first trade.

Before Figma started actually trading on the exchange around 2pm, some news outlets were already reporting that Figma was already expected to open at nearly triple the stated opening price of $33. I thought it had to be a mistake. But then Robinhood started showing the $FIG ticker, and the stock shot up to well over $100. Coworkers around me were going crazy, estimating their new net worth on the fly and reminding each other that we couldn’t sell for a few months and things were sure to go back down by then. But then someone said, “let’s leave the realism for tomorrow, today we can just be happy.” And happy we were.

After hanging around for a few hours and causing a scene in front of the NYSE, I went to Brooklyn for my night class. There was a flood warning so attendance was light and class was short - but even then I had a hard time focusing. I was still buzzing from the excitement of the day and it was hard to sit still. News of the insane stock performance was making headlines and my phone was blowing up with congratulations from friends and family. My classmates and professors were congratulating me on the IPO as well, and I was struggling to comprehend the implications of the day, as someone who has most of their net worth in Figma stock.

After class ended I went back to Manhattan, this time Tribeca, where Figma had rented out an entire rooftop bar for the celebration. Markets were closed, and people were ready to party. Everyone was congratulating each other (insert Obama medal meme here), and I saw executives meandering about the room, sipping non-alchoholic drinks while I gawked at people now worth hundreds of millions or (in Dylan Fields case) billions.

View from the stormy Tribeca rooftop

It was so nostalgic to be surrounded by so many people I had spent so much of the last four years with - and even more that I had never met who had joined the company in the past few years. It felt like we had all achieved something worth celebrating, and this was very public confirmation of our collective vision and hard work over the years. I spent much of the party just absorbing the room and feeling nostalgic for the days when I first joined. I could name nearly every peron at our two-floor WeWork, and missed the days when our all-hands included a personal introduction from every single new hire. I thought about the ups and downs of the past few years, and how truly lucky I was to have been along for the ride.

View by the end of the night (completely sober just bad at taking late night photos)