The Silicon Valley Darling with a Unique Aesthetic, Figma, the first unicorn to open an on-chain IPO channel

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Top Unicorn Prime for Stock Tokenization

On July 31, the Silicon Valley design software giant will officially go public on the New York Stock Exchange, underwritten by top-tier investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Allen & Company, and JPMorgan Chase, making it one of the most anticipated tech stock IPOs of 2025.

In the IPO-bound Figma's filed prospectus, a sentence caught our attention: the company has been authorized to issue "Blockchain Common Stock." This practice is still a first globally.

In fact, this is not Figma's first encounter with the crypto world. Previously, they had included a BTC ETF in their balance sheet. Figma's founder, Dylan Field, is also one of the few Web2 entrepreneurs who paid attention to Crypto trends very early on. Therefore, this is not an opportunistic attempt but an expression of long-term optimism about Crypto.

The world's most cutting-edge companies are demonstrating through action that they are gradually embracing blockchain technology. We should not underestimate this change. We want to re-evaluate this company from a more unique perspective: not only its valuation and growth curve, but also its product philosophy and capital structure design.

And all of this cannot be separated from one person—Dylan Field.

Who is Dylan Field?

In Silicon Valley, almost every successful-enough founder has to learn one thing: Becoming the Face of your company.

It's a face that knows when to speak and when to be silent; a face accustomed to the glare of the media spotlight; a face that can say "We are changing the world" into the camera. People's familiarity with this face sometimes even surpasses their memory of the product he founded.

Dylan Field does not belong to this category.

At first glance, it is hard to match him with the "Figma founder."

He is a bit chubby, dresses casually, used to have slightly long curly hair, much like Leonard without glasses in "The Big Bang Theory."

He actually used to be an actor.

The first time he stood on a stage in his life was when he was five years old. It was in a modest theater group in California, a theater converted from an old church, with flickering lights and backgrounds that often fell to the ground. He was not chosen because of his outstanding looks but because he "could sit quietly, recognize letters."

In the following years, he sporadically took on many performances, having his own agent in both the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and even appearing in commercials for eToys and Windows XP.

His brief "entertainment career" came early and ended early, but it subtly influenced his life.

While other kids saw the stage as a starting point to stardom, what Dylan remembered was how everyone backstage would silently switch places, move around, and cue each other during rehearsal breaks. He said that was when he first experienced the "power of collaboration," realizing that the key was not how well one person performed, but whether everyone could be in the same space, on the same beat, to deliver a performance.

This subtle clue threaded through his subsequent life.

In high school, he started dabbling in coding, using Dreamweaver to help friends with their websites. He wasn't like those teenage prodigies from Silicon Valley myths who created apps at age 12, nor did he write a blog titled "How to Build a Hit Product in Three Days." Later, he went to Brown University, where he considered other career paths, took some political science courses, contemplated a legal profession, and even thought about returning to the entertainment industry.

During his junior year, he met Evan Wallace, who would later become the co-founder of Figma.

Wallace was his classmate, a WebGL enthusiast who had created a browser rendering demo called Water, featuring rippling water effects that were so fluid and natural that WIRED called it "one of the most impressive WebGL demos."

Dylan was deeply impressed. However, what drew him in was not just the visuals but the underlying logic: if graphics could seamlessly render in a browser, could design also happen in a browser? Could it be collaborative too?

What he envisioned was that feeling from the days of rehearsing for a play—you take a step, I respond with a beat. Could design be like a performance, without the need to transfer files, version conflicts, but instead, multiple cursors in sync on a page, flowing like in rehearsals and performances?

In an era when everyone was talking about growth hacks, viral formulas, and exponential growth, this narrative sounded far from "Silicon Valley."

However, years later, Figma became a collaboration platform valued at over a hundred billion dollars, eventually taking the stage for an IPO.

In an era that encourages swing for the fences and betting on narratives, why is it that Dylan Field, with Figma in hand, became the one who lasted till the end?

The Entrepreneur Who Stayed Away from the Limelight

Let's go back to 2012 when Dylan Field received the "Thiel Fellowship Scholarship" founded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, becoming one of the 20 "young people allowed to drop out" that year.

He was 20 years old at the time, took leave from Brown University, and with the $100,000 prize money he received, rented a studio in Silicon Valley to prepare for entrepreneurship. However, at that time, he didn't know what exactly to do.

It's not that he didn't have ideas, but rather that none of his ideas at the time seemed to take off. Drone traffic monitoring, graphic editing, animation generation... during that time, he could only experiment and speculate, trying to figure out what he was really good at and trying to find a direction that truly worked.

Dylan rarely talks about these failures. He is not the kind of person who turns failures into turning points, nor is he interested in packaging early chaos into some kind of "inevitable path to growth." He just notes down the problems and then continues moving forward.

There was one thing he never let go of: whether the browser as a platform could support more complex collaborative behavior.

That was an idea he planted while interning at Flipboard. During his internship, he first experienced that the interface on the screen could be as smooth and elegant as a paper magazine. After that, he started to ponder: if the reading experience could be redesigned, could the collaborative experience also be redesigned?

That was not a trendy direction. In those years, the trend was in mobile, the App Store was booming, the great battle of ride-sharing was heating up, and growth hacking became the key word that investors loved to hear. The browser seemed outdated, and collaboration was not a term that could tell a high-valuation story.

He didn't follow the trend but dug deep into the "collaborative experience": how people work together, could that logic also be brought into the browser? Could it be designed like a system?

Although their direction was not yet fully defined at that time, after numerous discussions and trial and error, the word "collaboration" had become the logical starting point for their entrepreneurship, and all ideas revolved around "collaboration." It was like going back to a childhood theater performance, where everyone was in the same space, stepping to the same rhythm, and putting on a show.

Afterward, they gradually narrowed down the direction, starting to build Figma around the three key points of "browser + real-time collaboration + UI design," step by step constructing the framework of Figma.

Dylan was not the kind of person who could see the "endgame" early on. He didn't shout out interstellar plans from Day 1 like Elon Musk, nor did he draw out "closed-loop" ecosystems in a pitch deck like many entrepreneurs. He was more like someone starting to doodle lines in the center of a blank paper, only to realize as he drew, these lines unexpectedly formed a treasure map.

There is an interesting coincidence. Two years after Dylan received the Thiel Fellowship, Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin also received the Thiel Fellowship.

Vitalik went into the blockchain, redesigning protocols; Dylan stayed in the browser, redefining collaboration. Two system thinkers, entering the digital world from different points, attempting to answer in different ways the age-old question: how do we work together.

But Dylan did not make a big splash like Vitalik.

He didn't have a set of dazzling theories, nor did he ride any trend. He just honestly pondered a question: why can't designing software collaborate like the Web? Why do we still rely on files, version numbers, and back-and-forth sending? Why has no one changed this?

These questions are not sexy, nor do they tell a compelling story, making it hard to pitch to investors. But he just felt that someone had to solve it. This was the reason he stayed, the reason Figma was born.

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