Brown to Thiel Fellowship
Dylan Field studied computer science at Brown University, interning at O’Reilly Media and Flipboard. In 2012, at age 19, he accepted a $100,000 Peter Thiel Fellowship and left university alongside classmate Evan Wallace to build creative tools on the open web.
WebGL & The Collaborative Design Vision
Betting on WebGL when graphics tools were locked into native desktop software, Field spent four quiet years building a collaborative browser design engine. When Figma launched publicly in 2016, it democratized product design, allowing entire cross-functional teams to collaborate simultaneously in multiplayer mode.
$20B Adobe Bid & Independent Expansion
After Adobe attempted a historic $20 billion acquisition that was mutually abandoned amid regulatory scrutiny in Europe, Figma flourished independently, crossing $600M+ in ARR and expanding into FigJam and generative AI design systems.
