Iconiq’s Will Griffith explains how his company celebrated Figma’s IPO and why investors sold the stock

Will Griffith was nothing more than his job as a venture investor at Iconiq when he met Dylan Field, a 19-year-old college dropout. This leads to one of his signature seed investments at a startup called Figma.

Thursday, Figma has been released after stock has been released The opening price of the $33 IPO will close at a market capitalization of $115.50 and $47 billion. And Griffiths couldn’t be more enthusiastic about his admiration for the company.

“I’m going to one of these user meetings, and there are 15,000 people here and 5,000 have Figma tattoos,” Griffith smiled. From its early days, the founder of the company, which offers software for designers, “had a passionate desire to acquire, deliver and redefine this ecosystem.”

However, at that first meeting in 2013, co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were not tested. And at that point, so did Iconiq. It was known as a very secret wealth management company for many of the richest technological wars in Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

However, Fimma already had a champion. Field was an intern on LinkedIn under then CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner was an angel investor (and bought more) Stock in the later roundsWe also introduced fields to Griffith.

“We connected with Phimma before we got the early funds, before we got the venture fund,” Griffith told TechCrunch. Investors remember trekking to meet the founder. “It was like two guys and a dog in an apartment in Palo Alto, and I was working on these new graphics and design features in my browser.”

The demo showed how you can manipulate the light when editing photos in your browser. At the time, browser-based design software based on WebGL was innovative. Tech Giant Adobe has locked the graphic design market into desktop software. “I thought it was insane,” recalled Griffith.

The idea was highly unproven, Alexis Ohanian, who had invested from the solid initialization of his time, but was handed over to Figma when he saw the product a few years later in 2016. This week’s Tweet. The Ohanians called Figma a member of his “embarrassing mislist.”

But Griffith wrote a check. Incidentally, the seed share was priced at $0.0878 each, Figma Disclosure With the S-1A. And Griffin wrote more checks as Figma raised an additional round. The company raised a total of approximately $332 million in venture capital by 2024, Pitchbook estimates.

“We invested in seeds. We invested in Series A. We invested more. We did secondary. We also invested more meaningfully a year ago,” Griffin said.

Iconiq did not own at least 5% of the company. But it owns enough that the IPO is celebrated in the ICONIQ office.

“One way we celebrate is to guess what the stock price will be on the first day on the closing day. It’s a forecast contest around the company,” Griffin said. “There are some good awards and rewards.” If someone nails that number, they could get caught up in something like a healthy cash bonus or a trip to Hawaii.

When it comes to the weird part of this IPO, Griffen has insight. Most of the stocks sold were From the interests of investors, Includes fieldsIt said not the new shares issued by the company.

“I think it’s very generous that existing investors are willing to sell a lot to generate adequate supply for this IPO,” he said.

The basics of Figma are very solid IPO oversubscribed 40xAccording to Bloomberg, that means that far more investors wanted the stock than the available supply.

It could be as problematic as investor indifference, Griffin explained. He said the biggest institutional investors don’t bother IPOs that can’t trade hundreds of millions of worth of stocks. Additionally, if the IPO does not float sufficient stocks, the available stock prices can artificially inflate. This means that the company is not properly valued. If prices drop after the opening day, the company could also be artificially devalued.

According to Griffin, existing shareholders of Figma did not really want to sell their shares for $33. “We’ve been in this business since 2015, we haven’t sold any stocks and we’ll be meaningful buyers at IPOs,” he said.

Still, Griffin emphasized that for Figma, IPO day is merely a milestone and not the end. “I met Dylan, 19 years old, and we forged the partnership,” he said. He says he is “prideful” to see Field, the CEO of Fitma.

In the meantime, he says that Figma’s IPO Day will be spending “meetings with the next generation of founders.”