Figma: A Random Walk in Palo Alto
adamnash.blog
adamnash.blog
No amount of VC money can fix a bad company that doesn’t solve a burning problem for customers.
Conversely, if you do solve a burning problem for a lot customers, getting VCs onboard will be the least of your concerns.
From my observation VC money gives companies the opportunity to recover from mistakes (“pivot”) which is something companies without deep pockets can’t do.
My contention with OP's point is the absoluteness of the statement they made. They basically claimed that knowing the right people will fix all of your problems. If you read what they wrote, that's almost literally what they said. That is in practice extremely far from the truth. For every successful VC-funded company, there are hundreds that never make it to product-market fit. So clearly VC funding and knowing the right folks isn't sufficient for success.
In making such a strong (and in general provably false) claim, the OP is also taking away credit from Figma for their wild success. They got there through understanding their customers and building the best product on the open market. Period.
It's strange because Figma's success has basically nothing to do with "having enough VC money to pivot around to find product-market fit", which is the central tenet of yours and OP's point. Figma was on the right track the entire time. So this whole point is moot when talking about Figma.
Startups are fundamentally about finding product-market fit. No network can do the hard work of finding PMF for you.
Your claim seems to be that if you know the right people, you'll be successful. That's just flat-out wrong. So many startups are founded by people "in the right networks" and still fail. The vast vast vast majority of them do. How does knowing "the right people" (whoever this vague shadowy group of people are, I'm not even sure how you would define them) fix your problems for you?
Even more strangely, this has literally nothing to do with Figma. Like I stated earlier, they were successful because they worked on the right idea and executed flawlessly. What did their network do for them?
With some of the high money acquisitions where one VC buys another VC company I definitely feel that there are cases where one investor does a favor for one of their buddies. Basically they bail them out.
How many SV entrepreneurs actually care about that? What problem is Snapchat solving? Or DoorDash for that matter?
The game is about raising capital, first and foremost. Especially in a system where the amount of money you can raise is inversely proportional to the company's actual profitability.
Losing money hand over fist? Let us introduce you to our pals at Softbank and the Saudi Arabia "Vision Fund".
Maybe you personally don't find value in those companies, but hundreds of millions of people use Snapchat and tens of millions of people use DoorDash, so clearly they find value in it.
To go further on your point though, how did the Vision Fund solve any problems for entrepreneurs? It gave them a lot of money which they burned through, but then the floor fell out on businesses that weren't sustainable.
This is a marketing pitch, not a problem.
Restaurants have delivered since time immemorial and with better margins than anything Doordash has managed. The Snapchat "problem" was solved with two cans and a string. At least that was still an ad-free experience.
Entry then gets you opportunity to funding.
University circles, family connections, previous job or internship networks can also get you entry.
I tend to think that networks are not excluding on principle. If somebody can demonstrate value, people will be eager to include that person into the network. On the other hand, Quibi shows that networks alone cannot rescue startups.
The interesting group are all the average people who could create something successful (of the Figma type) together. As a group, they have access to all resources, but they don't coordinate them. $20B means that 20.000 people could come together and make $1M each. Maybe they need a tool (of the Figma type) to coordinate themselves and that's another startup opportunity.
And no, networks alone can't accomplish much, and having a great network is no guarantee of success. But clearly having a great, high value network provides a significant advantage over not having any network or only access to low value networks.
Arguably it goes to GP's point - it's not about having a network, but the "right" network. Quibi had the wrong network and was doomed from inception.
> If the network is that important, isn't there a startup looming that provides such a network to the many people who are not in one?
There is, it's called Y Combinator.
But attitude matters a lot: if you sped this internship complaining how people are unfair and are not inviting you the their networks and circles - do not be surprised success eludes you.
I personally would never associate or invest in somebody with your mindset: you already lost. I’d rather work with wildly optimistic, even deluded, people.
on HN it may seem like the only possible business is a tech start up with an acquisition as the measure of success, but it isn't.
Perhaps beyond that point of a weak connection is why SV is different than everywhere else. The author was ready to take a position in a startup out of the basic knowledge of the founder and the general idea. This is practically unheard of where I live. Yes, everyone wants to think it's like that, but in reality they will be asking for a "data room" from a week-old startup.
Yet again, you can't blame people because I don't know many intern-to-$20B-Adobe-exit around here... and there goes a cycle
For anyone else reading (sounds like the OP might already be aware), you may enjoy "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, a legendary paper in the field of network science, which describes exactly this phenomenon.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pub/papers/granovetter73ties.pd...
I feel like that papers over just how long it took for Figma to achieve takeoff with regards to revenue (https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1570881311153463296). must have been a nervous few years in the early days, and the series A/B folks really earned their keep.
Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future.
That's for sure. And I can be sure that Adobe knows they are stuck having driven down a wrong road for some time.
The big question is: can they revamp? Figma is designed from the ground up to be cloud<-> web, while Adobe's big money spinners have a long legacy of all-on-the-desktop. It's very very hard to retrofit the latter into the former. And they have a huge legacy customer base most of whom are unlikely to want to change.
It will be interesting to see how they proceed. Use Figma as an excuse to "eat their own lunch" (instead of, say, porting Lightroom, build from scratch the competitor to Lightroom that someone else could have written?). Or try to retrofit Lightroom?
My suspicion is that if they try the retrofit path they will not make it.
Me? I hate browser apps. But that’s just me.
I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it.
Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer).
Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..
That's the problem - and what makes this a true silicon valley story. Big entrenched competitor buys innovative competition. Maybe they won't kill Figma, but they will definitely make it worse.
The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. There's no regime change here. I see people comparing this to Microsoft acquiring Github. Microsoft is both orders of magnitude larger than Adobe and they paid way less for Github. They can afford to have Github as a form of "soft power" in the developer space, supporting their cloud work/developer stuff but indirect to their core revenue and business without needing to monetize it directly. Their CEO wasn't a moron and understood intrinsically there'd be a lack of trust and a hands off approach was needed. I'd be really surprised if Adobe shows the same grace in this situation. Figma was a direct competitor of their core business.
I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.
I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context.
In '07, Adobe's stock price was around ~$40. Today, even after the (undeserved, in my opinion) thrashing the stock has taken for the Figma acquisition, it's at $300. He 10x'd a multi-billion dollar company in about a decade and a half, while also simultaneously redoing its entire monetization strategy. It's nothing to sneeze at.
A quick search turns up interesting numbers from this press release a year ago (literally the first result in my search, so not digging too deep here) [1]:
- all-time record revenues in Q3 2021
- 20-30% YoY growth in every segment they play in
- the DocuSign acquisition has turned into a cool ~2B/yr business
- and creative revenues of 2.4B, i.e., almost 10B/yr
Is Adobe a dinosaur? Absolutely. Stock buybacks are a great indicator of this, in my opinion.
Could Adobe screw this up? Absolutely possible. As a good example, they do plenty of dark-pattern UX in their subscription and cancellation flows that I really don't like.
With all that said, I think there's a decent chance that we in the peanut gallery might look back on this in a few years and see it as a brilliant acquisition in the vein of WhatsApp and Instagram. Figma is a world-class product, leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
[1]: https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2021/Adobe-Reports-...
It's fair that you made this assumption given the rest of my comment but when I said "awful" I meant as a user/customer, not necessarily from a business/revenue perspective.
You can juice a company and have it be more profitable even if the changes are unpopular with your customers, especially if you enjoy an almost monopoly status in terms of your software being what is used and taught in schools.
>As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron.
Fair, but he's used to running the company in a very "fuck the customer" kind of way. If Microsoft didn't have a new and not hated CEO, opened up private free repos on Github and basically not touched it in any other meaningful way I think it would have galvanized a big change in that space.
I just don't think Adobe is going to avoid pulling some kind of "fuck you" move that triggers an exodus the way Microsoft did. This is a much bigger acquisition for them than Github was with Microsoft.
I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
>Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
If I was a shareholder, I'd want an explanation for how they ended up in this situation and what changes can be made to prevent it from happening again. But Adobe is culturally incapable of making good software, and it's clear they don't have product people in charge anywhere. At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
I think you're right their monopoly position has spoiled them, and it's led them to treat their customers rather poorly.
> I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
The impressive part is not the insight; it's the fact he was able to pivot a multi-billion dollar behemoth through a change like this. There's lots of ossified incentive structures and politics in a giant company like this, and it does demonstrate real leadership that he was able to pull it off successfully.
It is admittedly more of a feat of execution than of innovation.
> It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
Good question. And my answer is a bit of a cop-out, but I'd say it's basically the dictionary definition of disruption.
Once Adobe moved their business models to SaaS, they were puttering along and making little attempts at web-based software ("sustaining innovation"). Figma came along and grew from a prototyping tool to capture more and more of the design workflow; their disruptive innovation was baking collaboration in from the start.
The one insight as to "how to grow from this failure" (if you will) might come from the parallel to Instagram. After the acquisition, the Instagram product leaders were given more scope, resources, and power. Thanks to that, FB/Insta were able to successfully head off the threat from Snapchat by introducing Instagram stories. [1]
> At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
IMHO it would be (relatively) straightforward to leave the product team alone to continue iterating, while supercharging their GTM efforts by plugging Figma into Adobe's existing customer base.
To the Instagram example above, it would be very interesting if Figma's product brilliance was allowed to spread to the rest of Adobe's portfolio. As with most BigCo acquisitions, though, that's vanishingly unlikely. FB is IMHO a relatively unique counterexample in this respect. It's more likely people will drift off after their golden handcuffs disappear. They'll create the next generation of design startups, and the circle of life will continue.
And both have been extremely successful as businesses for a very long time. They may not be on the list if “cool” companies but their track record speaks for themselves. Highly profitable and keep growing.
Philosophy, product and brand strategy all go towards informing how stuff is designed. Adobe, I imagine, bought Figma to kickstart a new Adobe.
Same. I wonder how many people have truly switched from Lightroom "Classic" to Lightroom ("Cloud). I still base my work in Classic, but I wonder how widespread that is.
Part of the mental brick wall I have is that I’ve always equated browsers with surfing/reading and other light stuff. Opening a desktop app puts me in work mode. And the UIs (seeing the browser chrome in context with the app itself) makes me feel like I’m running a less robust app. I imagine these are hurdles I’ll have to get over within the next couple of years as more apps move to the browser :(
I actually would prefer to just buy Lightroom but I can't.
I'm sure it's not their purpose, however they may end up doing it unwittingly anyway.
"Developers" may not have moved in much percentage-wise. However, I have noticed quite a few projects moved to GitLab.
Projects being on Gitlab forces developers to exist in both places which cracks the "default convenience" monopoly of Github.
Disclosure: I host a GitLab instance at home.
The number one commandment of a startup is "stay alive"--everything else is secondary.
Reinvesting in growth when you're competing with Adobe makes significant sense to me. He went into this with chances that would not look good to any analyst at the start. This is going to have a profoundly different growth curve than your typical Kickstarter startup.
isn't that completely against the lean mindset?
This is insane. This reality doesn't exist for >99% of people.
As someone outside the US this sort of thing could never happen.
The narrative seems to ignore this. Infact when Figma came around I thought the idea was to combine Sketch (which was truly a pioneer, but limited to only to Mac) and LucidChart kind of web graphics tool to make a platform agnostic 'Sketch'.
Great idea - but it was mostly about execution, which was of course was beautifully done.
Whereas this blog somewhat smells of “History is Written by Victors."
Figma did the same thing. Figma is so incredibly better than what it was replacing, it was obvious how successful it would be to anyone who used it.
Figma as mentioned earlier executed beautifully, no doubt. But the blog narrative is somehow projecting that Figma had vision of WebGL vis-a-vis browser based graphic tools, which I know is not really true and somewhat akin to history is being written by victor.
Instead, Dylan & I talked about the transition from Desktop to Web 2.0, and whether now was the right time to bring graphic design to the cloud. John Lilly & I had discussed a hypothesis about this while I was at Greylock, and it was one where I had come to have conviction. The basic premise was that the combination of Web 2.0, Social, and Mobile had finally created the possibility of building truly useful and user-friendly collaborative software in the cloud...
This is also disrespectful to the pioneers - nary a word was wasted on people who came before Figma on browser as well as desktop. I wish there was atleast one line dedicated to 'Sketch' software - early version of Figma UI was copy-paste of Sketch one.
- Modeling tools are typically last in a company's budget
Fireworks had almost all the essential parts of Sketch a decade earlier. Adobe killed it after acquiring it, because despite owning 80% of creative tooling they don’t understand their own software.
If it were ‘Adobe acquired by Figma’ it might be different. But if terrible old behemoths can just buy off all competitors, then where are we going?
Maybe the lure of several billion is too much to resist.
Well yes seems obvious, unless they already had that kind of money. It's easy to say that from the sidelines, since I assume you haven't turned away several billion of dollars
Short of a slightly bigger house, I already have difficulty imagining what I’d use more money for (aside from start another similar company, which seems kind of pointless).
Another good reason to exit is also just to rest, take some time and enjoy the world a bit after being deep in founder mode for so long.
Might take another decade or maybe even 3 but when it happens people will finally be asking why Figma surrendered the same why we look at IG now and ask why did they ever sell.
$3.8M seed round
a properly structured round usually costs (12-17%) so ~15% of the company
that means Dylan raised at a ~$25M valuation
$20B is 800x $25M
So, for every $10k this self-congratulatory cough gave his former intern after their walk, he just made $8M.
Not too shabby, regardless of any emotional context you may project.
- “The best solution for a problem five years ago may not be the the best solution today, and it very likely won’t be the best solution five years from now. As a result, young engineers approaching problems for the first time can sometimes see opportunities that the most experienced can’t.”
This very much remains to be seen. Writing that as though it were a foregone conclusion is disingenuous at best (not to call it hollow marketing drivel, or a comforting lie). The only “fulfillment” that we can assume for now is that Figma's founders made a boatload of money. And maybe that's all the fulfillment you can ever hope for.
Afaict the uniquely web thing about this product is the lack of install (and to be fair maybe that's a killer feature). Is that it or am I missing something.
There's probably nothing unique about it, but the server/browser model allows anyone on a team to access the Figma project as long as they have a web browser, while a classic client/server model would require a dedicated client software to be installed to access the project.
On my last job, we switched from using Abstract for sharing designs between the designers and developers, to using Figma for both designing and sharing between all team members, and the switch was a huge success.
Speaking for myself alone, the experience on Abstract was pretty terrible: the native application didn't have a Linux version, and the web client was dog-slow, buggy and limited in features. Figma, on the other hand, being the same web client for everyone, meant a pretty decent experience from the get go, which was a welcome change TBH.
"Unique", I don't know. The advantage is that the cost to get people to engage with a design file is so low that it actually happens. It's just a link you click, and you're now looking at the design, or even a clickable prototype of the design. And I'm there, you can see my cursor zipping around, and you can leave a comment, or start a voice chat, and all of a sudden, I'll be damned we're collaborating.
If it's a desktop app, and they have to download it, a lot of people just don't do that.
I've only used Figma a few times to review designs, but found this unsettling.
Like if I was working away at my desk, and turned around to discover someone standing there watching me work. I would find that uncomfortable.
In my case, I was the one that felt like I was spying on the designer working. I couldn't tell if they knew I was there.
It seems like anyone with access to a particular project can watch the designer working away without being seen. Is this accurate? Is there a way to switch the multiplayer feature off?
You can always know if somebody is watching your file, because their avatar picture pops up in the top right corner. You could miss noticing that, if you're really focused on something. But if someone is zoomed in far enough to be watching what you're doing, their cursor is probably going to be visible on your screen.
I will never be comfortable with my team members watching me work without my control over that. Unless of course we're on a call with the intent to collaborate and share in real time. Otherwise I'm not onboard the idea that "multiplayer" is the default way of working.
My mouse movements and decision making at any given second in time are not inherently valuable, and are a mine to share, not Adobe's to publish.
It bothers me that the likes of Adobe and others try so hard to push a paradigm that results in more data points for them. More spying windows into the designer's processes, right down to mouse movement and other details. I don't understand why designers are rushing to hand over such data to what is essentially a cloud service data miner, soon to be Adobe.
Sketch came along with a tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files. To share the design the person would need to send them the sketch file and they would generally the same major Sketch version installed on their Mac. They also were operating an "indie" team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products.
When Figma came along, they were bit behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud/browser first architecture where there is no local files. There is no files on anyone computers, everyone in the company has access to all the files. There generally no versions, you edit the latest file. They also listened what product design teams actually needed. For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and components, and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). They also built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision and the cottage industry of other prototyping tools. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made Zeplin and Abstract obsolete.
So in the end what Figma built was a design tool that product designers and the product teams needed. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that make sense how things are designed and built today.
It's little bit like you can run your own git server and setup, but what Github build was the workflow and the tools for teams or groups of people to build things together. Adobe still operates in the world where they sell these specialized git clients for specific types of users for but there are no workflows or really a way to do anything together.
I was pitching an Open Source developer tools startup around here at this time. VCs laughed in my face since there's no business model in OSS or in developer tools.
And getting between MV and PA has always been pretty easy via Caltrain, and the various corporate shuttles that connect it to destinations.
The one bit that didn't resonate for me, as a local, was the reference to "City Center in Palo Alto". I've lived here for a long time and never heard a reference to "City Center".
There's "downtown"/"University Ave.", "Cal Ave.", and "midtown" (though there's not much there). Has anyone else ever heard of "City Center"? Were they literally just walking around City Hall or something?
Relevant: "The Creation of University Park Which Later Became Palo Alto" https://ralstonworks.com/RE-history/UniversityPark-PaloAlto....
"[In 1885] Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop had in mind to establish a town across El Camino Real to support the needs of Stanford University, including student housing, shopping, and recreation, but no liquor. The Stanfords asked the leaders of Menlo Park and Mayfield to close their saloons, but were answered 'No.'"
"With Stanford University's support, saloon days faded and Palo Alto grew to the size of Mayfield. On July 2, 1925, Palo Alto voters approved the annexation of Mayfield. The two communities were officially consolidated on July 6, 1925."
The sense i got of the place was one who's grandeur had passed. The furniture and the houses there seemed so dated, walking around the neighborhoods exposed all the cracked concrete on the sidewalks and the graffitis under the tunnel leading up University.
Take a short walk and you're in the great lawn at Stanford, such a shame how a beautiful city like that is not treated as it should be. I had far better experiences of public infrastructure during trips to poorer countries. The airport felt ignored, the caltrains felt dated and inefficient on the inside, i don't know. . . it just felt like everyone was waiting for a nuke to level the place and rebuild better than making it better right now.
FWIW, Caltrain is being electrified and there are people fighting for more development and density.
I travel internationally for work and when my return trips land in SFO occasionally, it feels like i've travelled back in time to an alternate timeline where the US lost the war or something.
My impression of Palo Alto as a single person was that it was beautiful, but quiet. It seemed to be oriented around family life, and families are generally not out and about after 9pm.
People looking for nightlife tended to gravitate towards San Francisco.
It almost felt . . . suppressed.
As far as feeling suppressed, $4,000/mo rents for small apartments will generally do that to a place.
You're not alone in disliking the place. I did a three-year postdoc at Stanford, and after my first year I moved to SF because it was clear that's where all the social life was.
The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto?
It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.
Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.
I'd argue that a well motivated student would do better by being in a slightly worse school
When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.
I once talked to an admissions counselor for a “selective” university who could name the challenging coursework and reliable recommendation letter writers at all the best high schools in the region she covered.
Elite colleges have required suicidal amounts of pressure to be admitted, for decades. I went through that, just that I got in. Typically with serious Attention Deficit Disorder and no treatment, there's no way to get into the top 6 schools.
No matter how otherwise intelligent, too many points lost to disorganization. Like can't start essays until last minute, forget the test that was coming up, 0% on some homeworks, very little sleep because of the procrastination that was a direct consequence of that condition, huge late penalties, when you need 90% averages for semester grades for all courses, an 89% is an F in that setting. Like then you gotta pull off miracles to make the grade back up. And for that you have to be desperate. That was the hard part, SAT was easy and fun, extracurriculars were competitive but cool, also fun, hard part was the GPA. Crazy standards.
It's a process with many satisfied quiet survivors and a smaller number of very visible tragic deaths.
I’m not interested in discussing race or gender politics here, but it’s worth pointing that out since your comment comes off as completely dismissive of systemic advantages, environmental factors, and personal networks that all contribute to success, as if to say that any personal success is the product of a single factor alone: grit.
But in modern times Masayoshi Son, Steve Jobs as well.
Same with Jobs and Masayoshi, other people also knew the people they knew, but only they did do what they ended up doing.
Also important to note that the author was nowhere near as high profile or rich when this occurred as he is today. This interaction happened when Wealthfront was just beginning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Nash_(executive)#Career
He doesn't explicitly state this in the piece, but it was pretty easy to infer from the things he does say. He has the connection to Nash precisely because he impressed him when he was interning at LinkedIn, before Nash became a VC, and before he founded WealthFront.
This is not a story of privileged connections in the slightest.
You're defining "success" as making billions of dollars, right?
In any case, if that's someone's definition of success and they make it, wonderful. It's great for them that they had luck and privilege. The greatest thing anyone can do for children and even yourself is to maximize "privilege".
I suggest you also talk to people with a more diverse outlook on life too though, I think it will be even more eye-opening. Take a random walk in a rural farming community, a small town, an average city or suburb, etc. You will find many people who have found success and happiness and are content because their idea of success is to raise and provide for a family, or own a home, or run their modest small business, or whatever.
Please look at this pitch. It’s hard to come away unimpressed with what he and his founder were creating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C1UUVdN3kdQ
I love when someone extremely smart and dedicated succeeds. Much better than a VC thought leader that happened to luck into the right startup and is now dispensing money and advice with abandon. That is luck and privilege.
Pointing out the rare advantages Dylan had in founding Figma doesn't take away any of his accomplishment. Privileged people accomplish things and overcome things and do good stuff.
The point is to highlight that the privilege is load bearing - that a good idea and an amazing drive is not enough and that you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people in order to get that idea off the ground.
It's not that Dylan should have had to work harder, but that millions of other driven people's ideas die for lack of exposure.
Part of it is ... sort of generically true in any chosen power structure in the world (easier for powerful people to do things for you if they like you, in theory). But because so much of this dealmaking and the like, and the completely capricious nature of VC funding in particular, means that if you're wanting to fundraise your job ends up being "be friends with the people with money".
And because it's so informal and based on friendships, each generation of money is... well, it's replicating culture from the previous generation. At least in more formal power structures there are exams or something to stop it from _just_ being about hiring people you like talking to.
The silver lining is I bet there's a huge untapped market in helping fund people in environments that don't require you to listen to a VC talk about how BTC is about taking power away from oppressive governments or whatever.
I bet there are loads of people who are interested in funding, in seriousness, and not necessarily looking for more drinking partners.
Almost the entire if superficial opposite of what created the Silicon Valley of wonder and lore.
Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
I think this only makes sense if you believe that "being friendly to future VC's" is entirely independent from "the family you were born into" - to which I would add social class and family connections. Given my experience with friendships and professional relationships I think you would have an advantage in getting to meet a VC and then making a good impression if you had experience interacting with people like them.
None of this is to say that it's impossible to make it without those advantages, but they do exist.
Saying someone is privileged because they graduated from Stanford highly discounts a person’s agency in their life.
Ok, I did. Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
This said, it is impressive in a mild sense. While convenience / access (the pitch's main take away) is a huge factor in the macro-state creativity - if these affordances are not paired with meaning, a sense of taste, or purpose - then one quickly ends up with 'animate all the things' level thinking (the micro-state of today). For some, this means a great income and massive economic mobility - not something to sneeze at. However, designing everything to be the same, from securing reproductive care to hailing a car, sterilizes the lives lived through software.
See how quickly Quark lost the most loyal and hegemonic user base to Adobe InDesign just over Adobe choosing to use the TeX paragraph formatter. Gone in eight quarters. Figma doesn't have itself embedded in national scale print plant with degree level of user education and per seat licensing including the multiple necessary third party adaptations at >$10k per seat.