After leading $20 billion Figma deal, Adobe’s David Wadhwani is in prime spot to be next CEO
David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s Max conference in Los Angeles in October 2022.
Adobe
In September 2009, with the stock market still in the doldrums from the Great Recession, Adobe announced plans to spend $1.8 billion for marketing software vendor Omniture, its second-biggest acquisition ever at the time.
Prior to the deal getting announced, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said at a meeting that he’s “always trying to not waste a good crisis,” according to the recollection of John Mellor, who was executive vice president at Omniture and stayed on at Adobe for almost 10 more years.
There’s a similarly opportunistic sentiment in the air today. With over three-quarters of 2022 in the books, Adobe’s stock is down 43% this year and on pace for its worst year since 2008, the depths of the financial crisis. This time, the company faces an economic downturn highlighted by soaring inflation.
Last month, Adobe agreed to pay $20 billion for Figma, the largest takeover of a private software company and a sum more than four times greater than what Adobe had ever spent in an acquisition. While Narayen is still CEO, he’s not the person who spearheaded this deal. That distinction belongs to the president of Adobe’s sprawling digital media business, David Wadhwani, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named because the details were private.
Wadhwani, 51, has spent more than a decade at Adobe over two separate stints, rejoining the company in mid-2021 after six years in other Silicon Valley executive and investing roles. Wadhwani, Adobe’s third highest-paid executive after Narayen, 59, and finance chief Dan Durn, is in the driver’s seat to become the next CEO, a position strengthened internally by the Figma deal, some people close to Adobe said. A former executive told CNBC that everyone is wondering when Wadhwani will get the promotion.
In January, Wadhwani and Anil Chakravarthy, the head of Adobe’s marketing software business, were each named as presidents of the company, a title Narayen had held since 2005. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in 2020 after serving four years as CEO of Informatica.
Some sources close to the company said Wadhwani and Chakravarthy are both strong contenders but cautioned that Narayen isn’t leaving anytime soon. The business Wadhwani oversees is roughly three times the size as Chakravarthy’s in terms of revenue.
For Wadhwani, Figma represents a risky bet on growth at a time when Wall Street is telling tech companies to tighten their belts and preserve cash. Assuming the deal closes, Adobe is paying about 50 times annual recurring revenue, and a price equal to double Figma’s private valuation last year, even with cloud stocks broadly down by more than half in the past 12 months. At the time of the announcement, the purchase price amounted to about 12% of Adobe’s market cap, compared to almost 10% for Omniture 13 years ago.
Cloud stocks and Adobe past year
CNBC
Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field will report to Wadhwani. Brad Rencher, former head of Adobe’s marketing software group, said Wadhwani’s elevated status became abundantly clear to him when he first read of the acquisition.
“I was like, OK, David was the sponsor. He was the one standing up and doing it,” said Rencher, who’s now CEO of BambooHR, a startup in Utah. A move that big doesn’t happen without the CEO’s support, Rencher said.
Narayen told CNBC’s Jon Fortt last month that he and Field had held “multiple conversations” over the years. Field said at a conference recently that Adobe first reached out to Figma in 2012, days after he announced the startup. But Adobe waited a decade to pounce, giving Figma time to show that it could succeed selling its software inside large companies such as Microsoft.
The make-or-break bet
In his 15-year tenure as CEO, Narayen hasn’t been shy about dealmaking, just at a smaller size. He orchestrated several billion-dollar-plus deals, including Omniture. The biggest prior to Figma was marketing automation software provider Marketo, which Adobe bought for $4.75 billion in 2018.
Figma is different. It shows Adobe’s willingness to pay top dollar for a trendy asset and let it run independently, rather than just buying companies and integrating their capabilities into existing products. And it might be Wadhwani’s make-or-break opportunity to prove he should be CEO of the fourth-biggest U.S. business software company by market cap.
Among past and current colleagues, Wadhwani is known to be unnervingly still in meetings, speaking in a slow and measured manner and often wrapping up by summarizing the three most critical points that were discussed. Rencher said there’s a clear similarity to his boss.
“He’s made in Shantanu’s image,” Rencher said.
Still, he can become passionate and animated. Rencher recalls a company offsite for executives a little over a decade ago at a spa resort in Carmel Valley, California, about two hours south of Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose. There was an icebreaker to try and ease the executives into conversation. But Wadhwani was ready to get down to business.
“We’ve got to change something or we’re going to be in trouble,” Wadhwani said, according to Rencher’s memory of the event.
Adobe said Wadhwani wasn’t available for an interview and the company declined to comment on succession planning.
Wadhwani is said to be a dedicated family man, with a wife, two daughters and a dog, though he allows himself one indulgence. When he travels on business, he insists on eating McDonald’s at airports. In particular, he loves the French fries, a former colleague said.
At Adobe, Wadhwani has been at the center of one of the most important shifts in the company’s 39-year history: the move from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. When Adobe revealed the grand plan for a new business model to analysts in 2011, Wadhwani was tasked with announcing the prices.
“We believe that over the course of the next few years as a result of this, we’ll attract over 800,000 new users — new incremental users to our Creative Suite — and do it in a way that’s good for the customer and good for Adobe,” Wadhwani said.
Revenue growth slowed and eventually declined as Adobe made its strategic and technological changes. But each quarter, hundreds of thousands more people signed up for Creative Cloud, a bundled subscription offering of key Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro.
Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe
Mark Neuling | CNBC
The revenue became more predictable and less closely associated with product releases. Investors responded by pushing the stock price above the $50 mark in late 2013 for the first time. It kept rising, and by 2016, nearly 7 million people were subscribing to Creative Cloud. In all, the stock price soared 233% over those four and a half years, compared with a 67% rise for the S&P 500.
Prior to the Creative Cloud launch, executives discussed the vision at an executive meeting at a lodge in Sausalito, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
It wasn’t a universally popular idea to bet the company on a new revenue model that was just starting to gain mass adoption in software. But Wadhwani spoke up in the middle of a disagreement and made clear that he saw real value in the effort. He showed the group early drawings of the product from company designers, said Michael Gough, a former Adobe vice president, who was in attendance.
“He was the one that was sort of rallying people to take it seriously,” Gough said. “Let’s talk about what would we actually do. What are we missing from the stack? What kind of resources would it take? He was taking the vision and creating a working plan, basically, and getting people to at least talk about the possibility of doing it.”
Jumping to a startup
By 2015, the subscription business was humming. Adobe significantly outperformed its target for paid Creative Cloud subscriptions. In June of that year, Wadhwani presented for the first time on an Adobe quarterly earnings call with analysts.
Three months later, he resigned “to pursue a CEO opportunity,” as Adobe stated in a press release. The new gig was made public a couple weeks later, when data analytics startup AppDynamics said Wadhwani would be taking over for Jyoti Bansal, a star founder in the software industry and the Bay Area.
Wadhwani told colleagues when he left that he wanted to be a CEO, said a former Adobe employee. Internally, there was chatter that he’d come to see that he wouldn’t be the next CEO of Adobe, according to a former executive.
Bansal, who’d guided AppDynamics into the billion-dollar startup club, was resistant to the idea of bringing in an outside CEO, said Steve Harrick, a partner at Institutional Venture Partners, an early backer of the company. Wadhwani eventually won over Bansal, who didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Harrick said that Wadhwani would frequently follow up with him after board meetings that ended without resolution on important matters. As CEO, Wadhwani pushed for engineers to build software in-house to broaden its offerings to existing customers, Harrick said. He also guided the company to become more dependent on revenue from subscriptions, rather than from more traditional licenses, an evolution he had advanced at Adobe.
Wadhwani was quickly poised to be CEO of a public company, after AppDynamics filed for its IPO in 2016. Early the following year, the company was set to raise almost $200 million and trade on the Nasdaq until Cisco showed up at the last minute and agreed to pay $3.7 billion for AppDynamics, more than double its expected valuation.
“They were not dual-tracking. They were not trying to be bought,” said Harrick. “They were earnestly saying, ‘This is a public company, that’s our marching orders.'”
Wadhwani stayed at Cisco after the acquisition. With Cisco trying to expand beyond networking and telecommunications gear and into software, Wadhwani advocated for the company to do more deals, suggesting it look at Datadog and HashiCorp, according to a former Cisco executive.
Neither deal happened. Datadog went public in September 2019, followed by HashiCorp in December 2021. However, Cisco did invest in HashiCorp in 2020.
Wadhwani left Cisco in October 2019 to join venture firm Greylock Partners, an early investor in AppDynamics. Less than two years later, he rejoined Adobe to again run the digital media business, but this time with bigger aspirations.
“He missed having a group of people around him where they were doing a lot of stuff together,” said Mona Akmal, co-founder and CEO of sales software startup Falkon, which was Wadhwani’s first Greylock investment.
Akmal told Wadhwani she wanted him to stick with her even as he pursued a job elsewhere. He’s continued attending every board meeting, she said.
Akmal said she wasn’t surprised to see Wadhwani return to an operating role, as she would joke with him that he was born to be a CEO. He’s tall and handsome, and his hair is always perfect, she said. She would ask about his hair, which has turned largely white, and question why he hasn’t dyed it.
“Are we doing the white hair because we want to look more executive?” she remembered asking him. “He would give you the smile, like, ‘Maybe.'”
Wadhwani rapidly got up to speed upon his return to San Jose. He’s participated in all three of Adobe’s quarterly earnings calls with analysts this year, providing details on Creative Cloud and, more recently, the Figma deal.
Internally, his targets included reaching creative professionals who are becoming more willing to collaborate, growing Document Cloud after the pandemic boosted e-signature rival DocuSign and popularizing Adobe Express to address the low end of the market, a former executive said.
‘Really important shift’
He’s been recruiting top talent, bringing back product veteran Deepa Subramaniam and technologist Ely Greenfield, who was technology chief at AppDynamics under Wadhwani.
At Adobe’s annual Max conference in Los Angeles this month, Wadhwani took the stage for the first time since 2014, and highlighted to analysts the opportunities to expand the digital media business.
He said the company was making “a really important shift and transition,” directing people who show interest in working with PDF files toward free services and then introducing them to premium capabilities. Wadhwani said the company has taken a page from its Document Cloud business and applied it to Creative Cloud, encouraging customers to pay for additional services.
At the event, Wadhwani said Figma’s popular design collaboration tools can accelerate Adobe’s effort to get more people engaging with documents in Adobe applications, thus widening the pool of potential customers. He invited Field to join him onstage and talk about Figma’s current projects.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup’s Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022.
Figma
During a question-and-answer session later in the day, Wadhwani sat directly to the right of Narayen, who was flanked on the other side by Chakravarthy. Wadhwani and Narayen seemed to have coordinated their outfits. Both wore sneakers and sweaters over collared shirts.
Jay Vleeschhouwer, an analyst at Griffin Securities, asked the executives how Figma can help Adobe become more web oriented.
“I could probably literally spend hours on file formats versus object models in the web and what it takes,” Narayen said.
Then Wadhwani spoke up. Figma doesn’t depend on any one file format, he noted.
“One of the things that we’re really excited about,” Wadhwani said, is “working with Dylan and team to take those core capabilities, take the core platform that Dylan and team have built, and really reimagine what should the flows be.”
“Good news is David can also talk hours about the same issue,” Narayen said, referring to his file formats comment. Narayen smiled as the analysts and his fellow executives laughed.
WATCH: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen: We’re looking to build this company for the long run
Technology
Nvidia’s set to regain some China access. But it still faces eroding AI chip market share
Photo illustration of Nvidia’s H20 chip.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Nvidia‘s H20 chips are likely to return to China, but tech experts don’t expect them to be met with the same fanfare in the market in light of new competition and regulatory scrutiny.
The Trump administration last month gave Nvidia assurances that it would be permitted to resume sales of its H20 chips to China, after their exports had been effectively banned in April. It also announced a new “fully compliant” made-for-China chip.
The move was seen as a huge win for the company, which had flagged billions in losses due to the policy. But while the H20s might be returning to the Chinese market that doesn’t mean Nvidia will regain its former market share, analysts caution.
In a recent report, global equity research and brokerage firm Bernstein forecast that Nvidia’s AI chip market share in China would drop to 54% in 2025, from 66% the year prior.
This drop is only partly owed to complications with resuming chip supply, as Chinese AI chipmakers have been seizing more of the booming domestic market.
“U.S. export controls have created a unique opportunity for domestic AI processor vendors, as they are not competing with the most advanced global alternatives,” Bernstein’s report said, noting growing prominence of Chinese players such as Huawei, Cambricon and Hygon. “The localization ratio of China’s AI chip market will surge from 17% in 2023 to 55% by 2027.”
Other analysts such as The Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman were more bullish about Nvidia’s bounce back in China. However, he also flagged potential market share erosion from Nvidia customers that might have found success with Chinese rivals while the H20 controls were in place.
It’s also worth noting that Bernstein’s predictions assume that broader U.S. chip restrictions will remain largely unchanged. That creates a dynamic where Chinese companies continue to develop and offer advanced chips, possibly eroding demand for outdated U.S. offerings.
Further easing?
Ahead of rolling back the H20 restrictions, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had been lobbying for more access to China, claiming export controls were inhibiting U.S. tech leadership.
While Trump administration officials had said the rollback was part of trade negotiations, analysts have echoed Nvidia’s basic argument that chip controls for the China market should be eased, thereby creating more dependency on U.S. tech offerings.
“The assumption is that by keeping U.S. technology companies in the China game, the U.S. can preserve and even grow its geopolitical leverage,” Reva Goujon, director at Rhodium Group, told CNBC.
In a report last month, Rhodium Group said that this logic may see the administration shift to a “sliding scale” approach to export restrictions that could allow U.S. chipmakers greater access to China as Huawei and other Chinese chipmakers continue to upgrade.
However, while Chinese AI developers will be happy to have increased access to Nvidia chips, Beijing isn’t expected to slow its efforts to steer companies toward homegrown AI infrastructure, according to Goujon.
She noted that the Cyberspace Administration of China’s recent summons to Nvidia was an obvious signal of the state’s intention to intervene in the local AI infrastructure market.
New Beijing scrutiny
According to the Cyberspace Administration of China, Nvidia met with Beijing officials on Thursday regarding national security concerns posed by the H20 chips, including potential backdoors that would allow parties in the U.S. to access or control them.
Beijing’s move appeared to come in response, at least partially, to new laws proposed in the U.S. that would require semiconductor companies such as Nvidia to include security mechanisms and location verification in their advanced AI chips. Nvidia later denied that its chips have any “backdoors” that would allow external access or control.
The move by Beijing was also likely an attempt to create some hesitation among Chinese AI developers looking to buy the new H20s, according to Futurum’s Newman.
“China wants to leave some levers in place to potentially restrict outside AI chips at some point down the line if and when it feels its homegrown technology is truly competitive,” Newman said.
Beijing has previously restricted American chipmakers’ business in China amid periods of intense technology and trade tensions between the two countries. Micron Technology, for instance, failed a cybersecurity review in 2023 and was subsequently blocked from critical IT infrastructure.
“The continued complexity of China-U.S. trade relations could bring further complications [for Nvidia] as negotiations continue and as China attempts to cement its own AI strategy,” Newman added.
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, signs the guestbook on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York on July 31, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg may be the most famous college-dropout-turned-tech-billionaire. Dylan Field is the latest, after his design startup Figma soared in its stock market debut this week.
The two entrepreneurs have something else in common: close ties to Peter Thiel.
Zuckerberg got his first outside check for Facebook from Thiel in 2004, soon before leaving Harvard University to build his social network in Silicon Valley. Facebook went public in 2012, the same year that Field scored a Thiel Fellowship, which gives money “to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” Over 300 people have been selected since its inception in 2011.
Field, now 33, was part of the second batch of Thiel fellows, a group of 20 entrepreneurs who each took home $100,000. The program doubled that sum earlier this year. Like Zuckerberg, Field came to Thiel from the Ivy League, having spent two and a half years at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
On Thursday, Figma’s stock price more than tripled in its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. It rose again on Friday, wrapping up the week with a fully diluted market cap above $71 billion. Field’s stake is worth about $6.6 billion. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, is now the world’s third-richest person, with a net worth of over $260 billion.
While the contours of Field’s story may sound familiar, he’s a very different kind of character.
“Dylan is, by far, the most humble billionaire I’ve ever met,” said Joshua Browder, CEO of legal services startup DoNotPay and a former Thiel fellow.
Mike Gibson, who used to help run the fellows program as vice president for grants at the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, contrasts Field with another tech luminary.
“He’s kind of like the anti-Steve Jobs,” said Gibson, a co-founder of 1517 Fund, a venture firm that prides itself on investing in dropouts. “When it comes to Jobs’ legend as this hard-charging a–hole, Dylan is the opposite.”
The Apple co-founder, who dropped out of college after one semester, died of cancer in 2011, as his company was on its way to becoming the most valuable business in the world.
Field was poised to officially enter the billionaire ranks almost three years ago. With Figma having emerged as a leader in web-based tools for designing apps and websites, Adobe agreed to snap up its budding rival for $20 billion. But regulators in the U.K. said the tie-up would’ve hurt competition, and the companies scrapped the transaction in late 2023. Adobe payed Figma a $1 billion breakup fee.
Figma’s IPO this week represented not only a massive valuation markup for the company but also served as a banner event for Silicon Valley, which has seen a dearth of high-profile IPOs since the market cratered in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates.
“The most important thing to remind myself of, the team of, is share price is a moment in time,” Field told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. “We’re going to see all sorts of behavior probably today, over the weeks ahead.”
Figma declined to make Field available for an interview for this story.
Field’s trek back to the Bay Area, where he’d grown up, began with a TechCrunch article about the fellowship. He submitted his application two hours before the deadline, on New Year’s Eve of 2011, while he was a junior at Brown. He left out his SAT scores.
“It is my belief that the SAT is a poor reflection of aptitude and can easily be gamed,” he wrote in his application, which he posted on LinkedIn years later. In the essay section, he was asked to offer a highly controversial take.
“Chocolate is repulsive,” he wrote. “Even the smell of it makes me want to vomit.”
In response to a question about how he was going to change the world, Field said he was going to build better software for drones, and that he would “cofound a company with the smartest programmer I know and work on this problem.”
That co-founder was Evan Wallace, who had been a teaching assistant for some of Field’s courses at Brown. Wallace was technologically gifted, earning the nickname “computer Jesus,” or CJ. But he was already 20, meaning he was too old to be eligible for a Thiel Fellowship.
Field scored the $100,000 from Thiel, and shared it with Wallace, convincing him to leave his academic pursuits. The pair moved into a small apartment in Palo Alto, California.
The drone software plan had gone out the window. Wallace wanted to develop something related to WebGL, a graphics rendering system for web browsers. A year later, they were showing investors a slick browser-based demo that allowed for the movement of a ball in a pool of water.
‘Anyone can be creative’
The obvious competitive target was Adobe, which was ending development of Fireworks, an app design product that it acquired with the 2005 Macromedia purchase.
“We thought, ‘Wait, maybe there’s an opportunity here,'” Field said on a podcast earlier this year.
“What we’re trying to do is make it so that anyone can be creative, by creating free, simple creative tools in the browser,” Field said in a 2012 interview for a CNBC special on the Thiel Fellowship.
In 2013, the founders started talking with investors about raising a seed round. Field showed the pool water demo to John Lilly of Greylock Partners at a Starbucks in Palo Alto. Lilly had previously been CEO of Mozilla, where an engineer developed software that led to WebGL. He was impressed with what he was seeing, but he didn’t think it had much economic potential.
Figma took on seed funding from Index Ventures and other investors. The founders assembled a small group of employees at an office in Palo Alto. Progress was slow. Early versions of the product failed to impress potential users. Field was micromanaging.
When Figma would show the product to companies in the Bay Area, reception wasn’t always great. Stress was building. Lilly, who ended up leading Figma’s Series A round in 2014, came to the company’s San Francisco headquarters the following August as struggles were mounting. Employees wanted changes.
“We both heard it,” said Danny Rimer, the Index partner who led the seed funding, referring to conversations he and Lilly were having with staffers about Field.
“We sat down with him and explained to him the situation,” Rimer said. “We heard it and we sort of said, ‘Look, this is an impasse. You’re going to have to adapt and change.’ And he heard it and he changed. I think that’s such a great character trait of Dylan, is to hear the information, be objective about it, process it and accept it and act accordingly, if it makes sense.”
Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, speaks at the startup’s Config conference in San Francisco on May 10, 2022.
Figma
Around that time, Sho Kuwamoto joined the company. Kuwamoto brought with him experience from Macromedia and Adobe. Four months later, Figma launched its debut product in a free preview.
Field got involved with users. He replied to people on social media who were posting about Figma, telling them they were receiving access to the preview. He also sought out prominent designers.
Companies like Coda and Uber became early adopters. Some designers were excited by the idea of sharing documents by copying and pasting a URL, instead of having to deal with versions, formats and updates. Figma operated in the cloud, providing all the necessary computing infrastructure, so users didn’t need their own powerful graphics cards.
It wasn’t until September 2016 that Figma made the design editor available for free to the general public and made it possible for multiple designers to make changes in a single file simultaneously. That became the killer feature.
The software started gaining traction inside Microsoft. But there was an issue. Microsoft feared that Figma’s lack of a clear business model might lead to a burial in the startup graveyard. Jon Friedman, a design executive at the software giant, visited Figma’s headquarters to deliver the message, Field told CNBC in 2022.
“Look, we’re all worried you’re going to die as a company,” Field recalled Friedman telling him.
The following year, Figma introduced its first paid tier.
By the time venture stalwart Sequoia Capital came on board in 2019, Figma was a hot commodity, raising its Series C round at a $440 million valuation. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed said some of his firm’s portfolio companies had started migrating to Figma, and founders were using it for pitch decks.
“Companies often will show prototypes in board meetings of new products they want to build, and so the first thing we saw a lot of Figma links for was that,” Reed said in an interview this week.
“It was a very easy investment,” Reed said. “We went through some of our old investment voting data. I think Figma might have been the highest vote we ever had for an investment.”
Sequoia’s extensive roster of winners over the decades includes Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Zoom and WhatsApp.
The Adobe period
Financial analysts covering Adobe started asking about Figma. Adobe, which had released the XD app for user experience design, responded, adding the startup to its official list of competitors.
But Adobe’s market capitalization sat above $170 billion, and Figma wasn’t even a “unicorn,” a status reserved for startups worth at least $1 billion. Field told Forbes that some job candidates were hesitant to join because of the modest valuation. In 2020, the company raised a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz at a $2 billion valuation.
Then came Covid. Offices closed. The world went remote overnight. Figma’s collaboration capability suddenly became critical to the way many more people worked.
“We asked ourselves: how can we help teams connect, have fun and enter a flow state during the earliest stages of the design process?” Field later wrote on Twitter.
The result was FigJam, a digital whiteboard that became Figma’s second product, and represented a key step toward diversification.
The Adobe noise continued to get louder. In 2020, Field had discussions with Adobe executive Scott Belsky about a partnership or acquisition, but Field chose to stay the course. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen talked to Field about a possible deal in early 2021, but again the Figma CEO demurred, opting to raise a round at a $10 billion valuation.
“Our goal is to be Figma not Adobe,” Field wrote in a 2021 tweet.
The environment quickly changed. By early 2022, with the Fed lifting interest rates to fight inflation, investors were selling out of high-growth tech and rotating into businesses with predictable profits. Sequoia was encouraging its startups to reduce costs.
David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media unit, speaks at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles, October 2022.
Adobe
Belsky again approached Field in April of that year, this time alongside David Wadhwani, who was leading Adobe’s digital media business.
“Mr. Field expressed openness to understanding the terms of a potential acquisition of Figma by Adobe, and Mr. Field, Mr. Belsky and Mr. Wadhwani continued their discussion of the potential benefits of a combination the following week,” Adobe stated in a regulatory filing.
Field was considering the implications of the rise of artificial intelligence.
“Look, when we did the deal with Adobe in the first place, my head space in 2022 was, “Oh my god, AI is coming. This is clearly exponential as a technology. I don’t know what this does to us. Is this one-tenth our market, is it 10x our market? What does it mean for creatives and designers?” Field said in an interview with The Verge last year. “And I was like, it’s better to team up in this world with Adobe and to navigate this together and to figure this out together than it is to go it alone.”
In September 2022, Adobe agreed to buy Figma for about $20 billion, announcing that Field would remain in charge of his part of the business and would report to Wadhwani.
“Adobe has a unique opportunity to usher in a world of collaborative creativity,” Narayen told analysts on a conference call the day of the agreement. “In my conversations with Dylan at Figma, it became abundantly clear that together we could accelerate this new vision, delivering great value to our customers and shareholders.”
That opportunity never came. An intensifying regulatory environment in the U.S. and Europe had made sizable tech deals more burdensome. Adobe was suddenly in the crosshairs, and the transaction was hitting repeated hurdles.
“We’re worried this deal could stifle innovation and lead to higher costs for companies that rely on Figma and Adobe’s digital tools — as they cease to compete to provide customers with new and better products,” Sorcha O’Carroll, an official at the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, said in a press release in mid-2023.
Around that time, Field announced another step toward product diversification by introducing Dev Mode, which turns Figma designs into source code that can serve as a starting point for software developers. The reveal came at Figma’s Config user conference in San Francisco, which attracted 8,000 attendees.
The U.K.’s investigation dragged on for months. Field was pulling double duty running the company and engaging with regulators. Adobe had said it expected to complete the deal in 2023, but time was running out. Regulators were proposing remedies that the parties didn’t like.
“Even toward the final months, there were these moments of, ‘Oh, this is going to go through,’ and moments of, ‘F—, what are we doing?'” Field told The Verge. “And obviously at the end, there’s a mutual understanding of,’ This decision has been made for us and let’s call it.'”
On a Sunday in December 2023, Field gathered board members for a 10-minute call, informing them that the deal was off. The official statement followed early on Monday morning.
“It’s frustrating and sad that we’re not able to complete this,” Field told The New York Times.
Not everyone in Field’s orbit saw it that way. Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra, a friend of Field’s and longtime Figma user, said the whole ordeal was having an impact.
“You could see it in his face,” Mehrotra said of Field, adding that he was relieved when he learned Figma would remain independent. “He was getting older right in front of us.”
But Figma had some business concerns. Its net dollar retention rate, a measurement of the company’s ability to sell more to existing customers, slid from 159% in the first quarter of 2023 to 122% by the end of the year, according to Figma’s IPO prospectus. Figma chalked it up to a tough comparison from the year before, thanks to the launch of FigJam, and economic uncertainty that caused some clients to reduce seat counts. The retention rate bounced back to 132% in the first quarter of 2025.
During the 2023 winter holidays, Field considered ways to rally the workforce. After the new year, he announced internally that Figma would give extra equity to employees who joined or received promotions following the acquisition announcement, because the valuation was going back down to $10 billion. He said any employees who wished to leave would get three months of severance, with no hard feelings.
Fewer than 5% of staffers took him up on the offer.
Pivot to prompting
As Figma pursues a go-it-alone strategy, it faces an existential question: Is the company ready for a future dominated by AI?
In May, Field took the stage at Figma’s user conference before 8,500 attendees at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, wearing a black “Config 2025” T-shirt. He walked the crowd through a slew of new products, including Figma Make, which draws on Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a large language model from AI startup Anthropic.
“With Figma Make, you could take an existing design and prompt your way to a fully coded prototype,” Field said.
A product manager, Holly Li, came up for a demo. At a laptop, she copied the design for a music player in the Figma editor and pasted it into a chat box, typing instructions to rotate the album art like a record while a song is playing. She showed apps created with Figma Make, eliciting some cheers, and returned to the demo.
“Okay. This time, the model had a little bit of difficulty, but that’s okay,” she said. The cloudy background image from the original design was gone, and track names became difficult to read. The crowd was silent. She brought up a working version in a different browser tab.
The feature went live last week. Mehrotra said it’s off to a good start.
Other products in the market were built with generative AI in mind. They include Lovable, Miro’s Uizard and Vercel’s v0. Brent Stewart, an analyst at Gartner, said that Figma is “utterly, utterly dominant” in design but that some of the offerings from other companies look more impressive.
Andrew Chan, a former Figma software engineer, wrote in a blog post last year that “an interesting and ongoing question is whether Figma can repeat the success it had in design with other products.”
Nadia Eldeib, a former Lyft product manager and CEO of startup CodeYam, tried Figma Make before the broad launch and put it up against Lovable and v0. Writing on Substack, she said it appeared to be at an earlier stage.
It’s the sort of feedback that Field will read and send to his employees, known as Figmates. He reads support tickets and mentions of Figma’s name on X, formerly Twitter. He took no time off to address such matters on the very day that his company was conducting its IPO, ultimately pricing shares $1 above the expected range.
Yianni Mathioudakis, a creative director in Maryland, tagged Figma in a post on Wednesday, asking if anyone had found a way to take a Figma Make design and bring it into the main design editor.
“Hi Yianni, we are working towards this and very excited about what it will unlock!” Field replied. “Please keep the Make feedback coming!”
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