Will Griffith had only spent two months at work as an ICONIQ business investor when he met a 19 -year -old abandonment of the college named Dylan Field. This would lead to one of its signature seed investments, to a start -up called Figma.
On Thursday, Figma published the stock from the IPO $ 33 opening price to close at $ 115.50 and a $ 47 billion market. And Griffith could not be more irritating to his praise for the company.
“Go to one of these user conferences and you are like. There are 15,000 people here 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith smiled. From the early days, the founders of this company that offer software for designers had “a strong desire to win and deliver and redefine this ecosystem”.
However, in 2013 during this first meeting, co -founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were not tested. And at this point, so is the iconiq. It was then known as the very secret wealth management company for many of Silicon Valley’s richest technology moguls, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
Figma, however, already had a champion: the field was a LinkedIn practitioner under the then CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner was an angel investor (and bought more Reserve in later roundsalso) and introduced a field to Griffith.
“We have been connected to Figma before we have an early fund before we had any business fund,” Griffith told TechCrunch. The investor remembers hiking to meet the founders. “They were like two kids and the dog in an apartment in Palo Alto, and they worked in these new graphics and the ability to design in a browser.”
Demo showed how the light could handle when processing a photo in a browser. At that time, webGL -based browser software was revolutionary. The Adobe Technological Giant had the purchase of graphics design with the desktop software. “I thought it was crazy,” Griffith recalls.
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The idea was so unproven Alexis Ohanian, who invests from his constant initialized, passed Figma when he saw the product years later in 2016, he noted A tweet this week. Ohanian called the Figma member of the “annoying miss-list”.
But Griffith wrote a check. Seed shares, incidentally, were priced at $ 0.0878 each, figma manifest In S-1A. And Griffith wrote more checks, as Figma set extra rounds. The company increased a total of about $ 332 million in business funds by 2024, Pitchbook estimates.
“We have invested in the seed, invested in series A. We have invested further. We did some secondary and we also invested more substantially a year ago,” Griffith said.
ICONIQ did not occupy at least 5% of the company, a bar that would require Figma to publicly disclose the size of its shareholder. But it is quite a bit that the iPO will be celebrated at the Iconiq offices.
“One of the ways we are celebrating is that we assume what will be the price of the closing day on the first day. It’s a forecasting competition around the business,” Griffith said. “There are some good awards and rewards.” If someone nails this number, it could end with a healthy cash bonus or even something like a trip to Hawaii.
As for the odd part of this iPO, Griffith has some image. Most of the sold shares comes from investor shares, including the fields, and not the new shares issued by the company, the company said.
“I think it is very generous that existing investors are willing to sell so much to create enough offer for this iPo,” he said.
Figma’s fundamental elements are so firm that the IPO was 40 times overlapAccording to Bloomberg, which means that many more investors wanted shares than the offer available.
This can be almost as problematic as the investor’s indifference, Griffith explained. The largest institutional investors will not deal with an iPO where they cannot exchange hundreds of millions of shares, he said. And if an iPo does not float enough shares, the prices of shares available could become artificially inflated, which means that the company will not be valued properly. If prices are reduced after the start day, the company could be artificially underestimated.
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 have not sold a share and we will have meaningful buyers in the IPO,” he said.
Still, Griffith stressed that for Figma, Day Ipo is just a milestone and not ending. “I met a young, 19 -year -old Dylan, and we forged a partnership,” he said. He describes himself as “proud” that he sees the field, Figma’s Managing Director, “continues to mature and grow, but has the same vision, moral, authenticity.”
In the meantime, he says he will spend Figma’s IPO day “meeting with the next generation of founders”.
