On October 20, 2022, Dylan Field sat on a stage at TechCrunch Disrupt and explained, in public, why he’d agreed to sell the company he’d spent a decade building to Adobe for $20 billion. A little over a year later, that deal was dead, killed not by Field but by antitrust regulators an ocean apart who agreed on almost nothing else that year. Nineteen months after that, he took Figma public at a valuation more than three times what Adobe had offered.

The sequence is the story. Not the sale, and not really the IPO either — the part worth sitting with is what happened in between, when Field had a company that a giant had wanted badly enough to pay $20 billion for, and no legal way to collect.

A decade before any of this was a decision

Field co-founded Figma in 2012 with Evan Wallace, a Brown classmate, after taking a Thiel Fellowship — the $100,000 grant that requires recipients to drop out of school to take it. It took four more years of building a browser-based design tool, a genuinely strange bet in an era when “real” design software meant installing something heavy on your desktop, before Figma publicly launched in 2016. By the time Adobe came calling in 2022, the product had become the default place a huge slice of the software industry did its interface design, and private investors had already priced that shift once: a $10 billion valuation in June 2021, per Adobe’s own disclosures.

Adobe’s offer, announced September 15, 2022, doubled that number to $20 billion — roughly half cash, half stock — with an unusual side detail that got almost as much coverage as the headline price: about $1 billion in additional retention stock for Field and Figma’s employees, vesting over four years, on top of the deal itself.

Why it never closed

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and European antitrust regulators both moved to block the acquisition on the same theory: that Adobe, which had its own design tools and a history of buying potential challengers, would use the deal to smother a competitor before it grew into a real threat. The CMA’s proposed remedies would have amounted to blocking the merger outright.

On December 18, 2023, Adobe and Figma gave up, telling regulators there was “no clear path” to approval and mutually terminating the agreement. Adobe paid Figma the contractually required $1 billion termination fee and walked away.

For Field, that meant absorbing a very public no — from regulators, not customers or investors — after fifteen months of believing the company’s next chapter was as an Adobe division. There was no consolation prize built into that outcome beyond the breakup fee. Figma still had to be a standalone company, competing with the acquirer that had just tried to buy it, with a workforce that had spent over a year assuming otherwise.

What $20 billion in cash couldn’t buy

Figma filed to go public in 2025. On July 31, 2025, it listed on the NYSE at $33 a share and closed its first day at $115.50 — a first-day gain of roughly 250%, among the largest of any billion-dollar tech IPO in years — putting Figma’s market value at an instant $68 billion. Forbes and Bloomberg both put Field’s own stake, in the low double-digit percentages, at just over $6 billion by the time trading closed.

In his letter to investors ahead of the listing, Field wrote plainly about the kind of company he intended to keep running: “Expect us to make ambitious bets when opportunities arise, whether to strengthen our platform or for significant external growth. That means we will sometimes make decisions that don’t immediately seem rational.”

Read next to the Adobe collapse, that line reads less like standard founder-letter bravado and more like a specific rebuttal: the deal that fell apart under regulatory scrutiny was, in the market’s own pricing eighteen months later, worth less than a third of what Figma would trade for as an independent company. The $20 billion Adobe was blocked from paying looked, for one afternoon in the summer of 2025, like the bargain.

The reckoning nobody put in the founder letter

That afternoon didn’t last. Through 2026, Figma’s stock gave back most of its post-IPO gain — down more than 80% from its August 2025 peak by mid-year, according to multiple market reports, as a January 2026 lock-up expiration released a wave of newly tradable shares into the market at the same time investors grew nervous that AI-native design tools would erode the category Figma had defined. Anthropic’s own Claude Design, a research-preview design tool launched in April 2026, was one of several new entrants — alongside moves from Adobe itself and others — that put the question of whether traditional design software still needs a dedicated interface in front of investors directly.

None of that undoes the sequence that came before it. It just completes it: the company that regulators said couldn’t be sold to Adobe, and that the public market said was worth $68 billion, has since had to prove that valuation over again, in public, every quarter, with no acquirer left to blame for the price.

What founders should actually take from it

The instinct is to read this as a story about regulatory luck — a lucky veto that let Field capture upside Adobe would otherwise have kept. That undersells what actually happened. Figma had already built a $10 billion private business and a product category before Adobe ever made an offer; the acquisition was a chance to cash out of continuing to prove that, not the source of the value itself.

The harder, more useful lesson is what the deal’s collapse forced: Field didn’t get to spend 2024 integrating into Adobe’s org chart. He had to keep running an independent company, with real competitors and a workforce that had just watched a sale evaporate, and make it worth more on its own than the acquirer’s check. That the market agreed, and then took most of its verdict back within a year, is the part a rejection-to-riches version of this story leaves out — and the part that actually matters if you’re building something an acquirer might one day want.

An offer you can’t close is not nothing. It’s a valuation someone else was willing to put a legal signature on. What you do with the company after the deal dies is the only part still up to you.

This is an editorial profile assembled from public reporting, Adobe’s and Figma’s own disclosures, and Figma’s IPO founder letter. Sources: Figma — IPO founder letter, Adobe Newsroom — merger termination, CNBC — Adobe to acquire Figma, Gibson Dunn — termination of Adobe/Figma merger, Forbes — Figma’s IPO makes Field a billionaire.