Will Griffith was nothing more than his job as a venture investor at Iconiq when he met Dylan Field, a 19-year-old college dropout. This leads to one of his signature seed investments at a startup called Figma.
On Thursday, Figma was closed to a market capitalization of $115.50 and $47 billion from the opening price of the $33 IPO, and was released after a stock price. And Griffiths couldn't be more enthusiastic about his admiration for the company.
“I'm going to one of these user meetings, and there are 15,000 people here and 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith smiled. From its early days, the founder of the company, which offers software for designers, “had a passionate desire to acquire, deliver and redefine this ecosystem.”
However, at that first meeting in 2013, co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were not tested. And at that point, so did Iconiq. It was known as a very secret wealth management company for many of Silicon Valley's wealthiest technical moguls, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
However, Fimma already had a champion. Field was an intern on LinkedIn under then CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner was an angel investor (and bought more stocks in the later rounds), introducing the field to Griffiths.
“We connected with Phimma before we got the early funds, before we got the venture fund,” Griffith told TechCrunch. Investors remember trekking to meet the founder. “It was like two guys and a dog in an apartment in Palo Alto, and I was working on these new graphics and design features in my browser.”
The demo showed how you can manipulate the light when editing photos in your browser. At the time, browser-based design software based on WebGL was innovative. Tech Giant Adobe has locked the graphic design market into desktop software. “I thought it was insane,” recalled Griffith.
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The idea was highly unproven, Alexis Ohanian, who had invested in from a solid initialization of his time, but was handed over to Figma when he saw the product a few years later in 2016, he pointed out in a tweet this week. The Ohanians called Figma a member of his “embarrassing mislist.”
But Griffith wrote a check. Incidentally, seed stocks are priced at $0.0878 each, and Figma is revealed in the S-1A. And Griffith wrote more checks as Figma raised an additional round. The company raised a total of approximately $332 million in venture capital by 2024, Pitchbook estimates.
“We invested in seeds. We invested in Series A. We invested in more. We did secondary. We also invested in a year ago more meaningful,” Griffith said.
Iconiq did not own at least 5% of the company. But it owns enough that the IPO is celebrated in the ICONIQ office.
“One way we celebrate is to guess what the stock price will be on the first day on the closing day. It's a forecast contest around the company,” Griffith said. “There are some good awards and rewards.” If someone nails that number, they could get caught up in something like a healthy cash bonus or a trip to Hawaii.
Griffith has insight into the strange parts of this IPO. The majority of the shares sold came from stocks of investors, including the field, rather than new stock issued by the company.
“I think it's very generous that existing investors are willing to sell a lot to generate adequate supply for this IPO,” he said.
The basics of Figma were so solid that IPOs were overregistered 40 times. This means that far more investors wanted the stock than the available supply.
It could be as problematic as investor indifference, Griffith explained. He said the biggest institutional investors don't care about IPOs that can't trade hundreds of millions of worth of stocks. Additionally, if the IPO does not float sufficient stocks, the available stock prices can artificially inflate. This means that the company is not properly valued. If prices drop after the opening day, the company could also be artificially devalued.
The existing shareholders of Figma didn't really want to sell the stock for $33, Griffith said. “We've been in this business since 2015, we haven't sold any stocks and we'll be meaningful buyers at IPOs,” he said.
Still, Griffith stressed that for Figma, IPO Day is merely a milestone and not the end. “I met Dylan, 19 years old, and we forged the partnership,” he said. He says he is “prideful” to see Field, the CEO of Fitma.
In the meantime, he says that Figma's IPO Day will be spending “meetings with the next generation of founders.”