Dylan Field dropped out of an Ivy League school in 2012 to take a grant from the billionaire Peter Thiel and start a software company called Figma. A decade later, Field’s stake in the company is now worth over $2 billion.
This week’s sale of Figma to Adobe Inc. for $20 billion makes Field, 30, by far the wealthiest person to go through the Thiel Fellowship. The controversial program was designed by the PayPal co-founder to undermine the value of traditional education by encouraging young adults to leave college and start companies with $100,000 grants.
Field is a rare example of when a gamble like that pays off. His stake in Figma alone is worth more than $2 billion at the acquisition price, according to an analysis of PitchBook data by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Adobe is also issuing about 6 million restricted stock units to Field and his employees that will vest over four years, valued at about $1.8 billion at Adobe’s current share price, which took a hit after Bloomberg first reported on the deal Thursday.
In an interview, Field showed little interest in reflecting on his financial gains from the transaction.
“First of all, it hasn’t closed,” he said. “My focus has not been about money for a long time.”
Work on technology startups has occupied Field’s entire adult life. He interned at the news aggregation app Flipboard, said Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures who was a Flipboard director and recalled a presentation Field gave to the board.
Field briefly attended Brown University before taking the Thiel Fellowship. He started on Figma, which allows customers to collaborate on software as they build it, after winning his spot in the fellowship.
“Training yourself to use Photoshop is a long, arduous process,” Field said in a 2012 Thiel Fellowship pitch for the company that would become Figma. He then outlined a vision for “simple creative tools in the browser.”
The Thiel Fellowship has plenty of detractors. Though it has a few success stories — the Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin and self-driving car entrepreneur Austin Russell even became fleeting billionaires themselves — there are others who failed to find success and struggled to get back on track. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president, in 2013 called the program “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.”
Jimmy Koppel, a founder of developer-training firm Mirdin, was in the same Thiel Fellowship year as Field. He remembered Field’s startup being one of the most successful in fundraising during the first year, a sign he was on to something.
People who know Field often describe him with a platitude that, in this case, may actually be true: He’s nice. While in the Thiel program, Field proposed that the organizers add criteria to the final round for fellowship candidates to assess whether they were nice enough to earn a spot, Koppel said. He recalled Field saying he’d be fine passing up the next Steve Jobs because it’s more important to have people you want to spend time with.