Dylan Field

Origins and early life

Dylan Field was born in 1992 and grew up in Penngrove, in Sonoma County, California, the only child of Andy Field, a respiratory therapist, and of Beth, a resource specialist teacher, who named him after the poet Dylan Thomas.

Work and career

He is Jewish, as he said himself on Christmas Day 2017, joking that he was steering clear of Santa because Santa had finally figured out that he was Jewish. After Rohnert Park's Technology High School he studied computer science at Brown University, where he met Evan Wallace, a fellow student whose experiments with graphics in the browser pointed the way. In 2012 he was one of twenty young people awarded a Thiel Fellowship of 100,000 dollars on condition that they leave university for two years, and he left Brown to build a company with Wallace.

Figma, founded in 2012, set out to make a design tool that runs in the web browser, where several people can edit the same file at once, so that designers no longer lose hours to outdated versions. Its closed beta opened in December 2015, the first public release followed in 2016 and the first paid version in 2017. The company grew into a design and product-development platform used every month by more than 13 million people, only a third of them designers.

A planned 20-billion-dollar acquisition by Adobe was abandoned over regulatory concerns in the United Kingdom, and on 31 July 2025 Figma began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FIG, with Field still its chief executive.