Figma and Backers Raise $1.2 billion in IPO

Key Takeaways

Kleiner Perkins history with Dylan Field the CEO goes way back and I'm just interested as to your perspective of what you saw in him >> in that series B round. >> Yeah. So we've been fortunate partners with Dylan Field for the last 8 years or so and Dylan always embodied the spirit of what we embody at Clifford is we want to back founders who make history and Dylan is certainly one of those. If we actually look back at our investment memo from 2017, uh we wrote something like Dylan and Evan are special founders and they reference as such and they built a team around themselves that will help them scale and that absolutely still holds today just as we look at the team that was up there ringing the bell with us and quite a few of those folks were with us back in 2017 >> and and like we're looking at a photo as you speak of you with Dylan and what's also interesting is it was your first ever check that you wrote a clin I mean I'm don't know if you could say what the valuation was back then but it was definitely sub 200 million and now it's worth potentially 20 billion I'm looking at indications that this stock is going to double as it opens how does that make you feel that it's a $40 billion company >> yeah well I guess nothing surprises me with this company yeah and just going back to when we first invested uh it was a bit of this unmistakable love for the product that we see here on here at the NYC today. If you look around, you see just like the the Coachella for design that is happening around us here. And uh that was actually the the love that people had for the product. Uh and in 2017, the user base may have been small, the product may have been early, but you would walk around cafes around San Francisco with people using Figma to design things and digital products even at that time. And that really just kind of continues on. And and I had some of this perspective from early investments in Box and Figma where I saw great products built that had this amazing bottoms up enterprise adoption. And Figma sort of followed that path as well. And what was really just stood out for Figma though was the depth of engagement that Figma had in those days which really spoke to designers who were using Figma Figma daily to get their job done and that sort of like that Dow Mau that depth of engagement was incredible even then and now it's you know just expanded multiffold >> the depth of engagement in the stock I'm just being told that there's a 75 to $80 per share indication on the stock right now that is even As in the S1, Dylan Field is very clear that he's focused on building this company. He's not looking at profit. He's looking at being thoughtful, but he's investing in M&A and he's investing in innovation. >> Yeah. >> How important is that investment, self-investment, growth over profitability when he's got generative AI startups coming at him? >> Yeah, AI is probably the biggest thing that's happened to us maybe in all time. uh it will have a tremendous societal and economic impact on all of us and we're excited about it. Uh and we're excited about it not just at Figma overall as uh at Kleiner Perkins we're excited about it. But as we think about AI and what the capabilities of AI which is to create more software faster uh there's a an important role that design plays. It is melding both the machine intelligence in artificial intelligence with human creativity and that is precisely where Figma plays is that we are the platform that where products get built and where AI products get built and that's the position that we have >> going back to where the stock is indicated there was a very thorough a very thorough process as the company went out and road showed and got really a test of demand but at your share price doubles on day one and you have an influx of retail investors. You got the head of product at X saying this is going to be the meme stock of all meme stocks. Do you want that as someone who's going to be, I'm assuming, holding this stock for the longer term? >> Yeah, I I think we want people to go and learn about Figma. If you haven't used it, tried it, uh go play with it and have more people use the products. And we have not just one product, our design product, we have now eight products. And I think there's something for everyone. Uh even my my young children who are just outside here use Figma products uh to design websites to build products. Yeah. And so I think there is a market for a lot more people than our tens of millions of users today out there. And so, uh, if it gives an opportunity for folks to get to know more Figma products, that's a great thing >> and a global product because I think what stands out for me reading the S1 is that 80% of users and there's 13 million of them on a monthly active basis are actually outside the United States. What does the global nature of this business mean to you? Yeah, to your point 80% is international and uh it's actually also 80% of the users of Figma are non-designers. >> And if you think about it, there are billions of people consuming digital products today that are designed inside of Figma. If you look at Google Maps, if you're hailing a ride through Uber or streaming a show on Netflix, those are all products that are today being designed inside of Figma. So the global impact and scale is tremendous and 95% of the Fortune 500 are customers of Figma. >> But do you need that to go public in this moment? Does other portfolio companies need to be that international to have this level of demand or is it just having a growth story? I I I think generally speaking more software companies go international faster as the world gets flatter and that's just been our experience in software.