Hey hey,

This has to be the moment in the history of design tools most people missed. In September 2016, Figma shipped its first public release. It worked entirely in a browser.

There was no need for download or installation.

And while everyone was logged in, you could see your teammates' cursors moving around the canvas in real time, like a shared Google Doc but for design.

Nobody asked for that.

Design had always been a solo activity. You worked on your file, saved it, emailed it to a colleague, they added comments, and the cycle repeated. That was just how it worked.

Figma found it broken.

What happened next is the story of how one product decision built a $10 billion company, attracted a $20 billion acquisition offer from Adobe, and made Figma so valuable that Adobe's own shareholders punished the company just for trying to buy it.

Dylan Field and Evan Wallace started working on Figma in 2012 while studying computer science at Brown University.

Field won a Thiel Fellowship, a $234,460 grant for young founders willing to leave university and build something, and dropped out to do that.

The original ambition was to make creative tools that worked for anyone, in a browser. They tried a few ideas before landing on design software.

The browser-first decision was the foundation of everything.

In 2012, this was still an unusual choice.

Sketch, the dominant design tool, was Mac-only desktop software. Adobe invested in its Creative Cloud suite, none of which ran meaningfully in a browser.

The conventional wisdom was that design work, with its complex vector rendering and large files, was too demanding for the web.

Wallace, who had studied graphics and taught CS, disagreed. He spent years building a custom rendering engine that could handle design work entirely in a browser.

The team ran a free invite-only preview programme starting in December 2015, backed by $14 million in Series A funding from Greylock.

The public launch came on September 27, 2016.

On launch day, Wallace explained how they had built multiplayer editing directly into the core of the product. Not as a feature. As the default way Figma worked.

Every user who opened a file in Figma could see every other user in that file, in real time. Their cursor appeared with their name.

Their selections were visible. If a designer moved a button, a product manager watching the same file would see it move.

Before Figma, design files lived on one person's laptop. The designer was the gatekeeper. A PM who wanted to check the latest mockup had to ask.

A developer who needed a spacing value had to wait. An engineer checking brand colours had to find the Sketch file, open it on a Mac, and hope it was the right version. Figma made the file the live source of truth.

Everyone, from designers and engineers to product managers and stakeholders, opened the same link and saw the same thing.

Feedback became immediate. Handoffs stopped being handoffs.

Because Figma ran in a browser, sharing a file required nothing more than a link. It removed every step involved in the typical sharing process.

A stakeholder who had never heard of Figma could open a design in their browser and leave a comment. Because it was multiplayer, those non-designers were not passive recipients but were participants.

Product managers started living in Figma. Engineers inspected designs directly. Executives left comments on prototypes instead of getting a PDF.

The product spread the way Slack grew: sideways through teams.

It followed a product-led growth strategy. One designer used it. They shared a link. Before long, the entire product organisation was in Figma.

By April 2020, Figma had raised $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of over $2 billion. By June 2021, a further $200 million round led by Durable Capital Partners put the valuation at $10 billion.

Thousands of designers and developers at Microsoft relied on Figma to build Office and Windows. And so did teams at Uber, Slack, and Airbnb.

Adobe saw it all. By 2021, Adobe XD had begun losing market share to Figma. That's because Figma was no longer a challenger.

Adobe had Photoshop and Illustrator, the tools that defined digital design for a generation. It had a vast Creative Cloud subscriber base.

And yet the company making the actual product decisions at Silicon Valley's most important tech firms was a browser-based startup that had been working for less than a decade.

On September 15, 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion in cash and stock, the company's largest acquisition ever.

Field would remain as CEO. Adobe called it a chance to "reimagine the future of creativity and productivity." The design community was alarmed.

Designers who had moved to Figma precisely because it was not Adobe worried that the product would be absorbed into Creative Cloud.

Adobe's stock fell 17% on the day of the announcement.

That was a signal that investors were also sceptical.

Observers compared the move to Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp: a dominant platform buying the competitor that had already shown it could replace them.

The US Department of Justice opened an investigation in November 2022. The European Commission began its own review in February 2023.

The argument from regulators was straightforward.

Adobe was buying the company that had already replaced its design business. It looked less like a merger and more like a competitor elimination.

On December 18, 2023, Adobe and Figma abandoned the deal.

Adobe cited "no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals" from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.

Under the original agreement, Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion reverse breakup fee.

Figma had spent fifteen months watching a proposed deal move through regulatory review, and emerged from it having received $1 billion, still independent, and more visible than at any point in its history.

The regulatory block validated something many had suspected for years. Figma had not just built a competing product, but the category.

When the European Commission assessed whether the acquisition would harm competition, it found that Figma and Adobe were direct competitors in the market for professional design tools. Figma's position was that of the standard.

Figma had been built on another assumption: that design was a conversation.

Figma kept building throughout the acquisition period and accelerated after. FigJam extended the shared canvas to whiteboarding and planning.

Dev Mode gave engineers a structured way to inspect designs and pull code values.

At Config 2025, Figma announced Figma Sites for publishing designs to the web, and Figma Make, a prototype-and-code generation tool powered by Anthropic's Claude.

In April 2025, Figma filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC.

On July 31, 2025, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FIG. Shares opened at $85, and the company closed the day at a market value of approximately $56.3 billion. That was more than tripling its IPO price.

Figma reported annual revenue of $1.056 billion in 2025. The company that Adobe had tried to buy for $20 billion was now worth nearly three times that.

Most people, when they think about Figma, think about the design features, such as auto-layout, component libraries, and prototyping.

These are so good. But they are not what built the company.

The thing that built Figma was the decision to treat design as a shared activity from the start. Not a file one person owned and others received. A live workspace where everyone who touched a product could be present at the same time.

However, that decision was not obvious in 2012. The whole industry had decided that design tools were for designers. Figma decided they were for product teams.

The browser became its distribution strategy. If the file opens via a link, anyone can join without downloading anything. Multiplayer was the retention strategy: once your team is inside the same canvas, no single person can easily migrate somewhere else.

The viral spread through companies was the product working exactly as intended. Adobe saw the industry in 2022 and concluded that the only move was to buy the company that had beaten it.

But Figma's answer, after 15 months of scrutiny and a $1 billion breakup fee, was to go public and be worth three times what Adobe had offered.

That is what one counterintuitive product decision, made early and defended consistently, can produce.

So, what does this make you think about the tools your own team uses every day, and the assumptions baked into how they were designed?