Figma’s CEO sent cold emails and bought coffee to convince former LinkedIn and Flipboard coworkers to use his product before its $68 billion success
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Dylan Field may not be helming a $68 billion company if it weren’t for cold-calling his former coworkers and taking his tech “heroes” for coffee—and execs at Google and Squarespace found success the s...
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personal finance
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August 11, 2025
03:07 PM
Fortune
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Success·CareersFigma’s CEO sent cold s and bought coffee to convince former LinkedIn and Flipboard coworkers to use his duct before its $68 billion successBy Emma BurleighBy Emma BurleighReporter, SuccessEmma BurleighReporter, SuccessEmma Burleigh is a reporter at Fortune, covering success, careers, entrepreneurship, and personal finance
Before joining the Success desk, she co-authored Fortune’s CHRO Daily , extensively covering the workplace and the future of jobs
Emma has also written for publications including the Observer and The China ject, publishing long-form stories on culture, entertainment, and geo
She has a joint-master’s degree from New York University in Global Journalism and East Asian Studies.SEE FULL BIO Dylan Field may not be helming a $68 billion company if it weren’t for cold-calling his former coworkers and taking his “heroes” for coffee—and execs at Google and Squarespace found success the same way.Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty ImagesFigma’s billionaire CEO Dylan Field cold-ed his former coworkers from LinkedIn, Flipboard, and O’Reilly Media as the then 19-year-old was looking to get his design tool off the ground
The millennial cofounder used the same tactic to take his “heroes” out for coffee
Now, Figma is a $68 billion success
And multimillionaires and executives at Google and Squarespace have found success the same way
Job-seekers are all turning to out-of-the-box ways to advance their careers: from dering donuts to Silicon Valley bosses, to waitressing at conferences to hand out CVs
However, Figma CEO Dylan Field used some age-old tricks to get people on board with his now $68 billion breakout success
The 33-year-old CEO was just 19 when he founded the online design tool in 2012, and the aspiring entrepreneur pulled on any loose thread he could find to persuade others to use it. “Really, the first users of Figma, a lot of it was cold-ing and people in-network,” Field recently revealed at Y Combinator’s AI startup school. “So folks that I had interned with…and from that, there were people I could reach out to that could tell me others to talk with.” Field had dropped out of the Ivy League school Brown University and took up Peter Thiel’s prestigious fellowship, granting Field $100,000 to launch his startup
But if it weren’t for his nine-month re assistant job at Microsoft, four-month data analytics internship at LinkedIn, and two internships at aggregation software company Flipboard, he may not have amassed a base to get his running
Field didn’t stop at cold-calling his ex-coworkers and gaining steam behind a screen—he also scraped the internet for the best talent
If they agreed to hear out his Figma dream, he took them out for coffee and sang his praises of their influence
Surprisingly, in a world of rampant ghosting, a lot of people took the bait. “I just looked online, , ‘Who are the designers that I think could be really helpful to us and I respect their work?’ If they answer my and they let me buy them a coffee, it’ll just be a personal moment for me, because they’re my hero,” Field recalled. “And a lot of them replied
It’s kind of wild that people reply to cold s, but they do.” Fortune reached out to Figma for
Millionaires and executives at Google and Squarespace who put themselves out there Figma’s CEO isn’t the only one admitting to reaching out to the upper echelons of for help out of the blue—and actually finding success from it
Venture capitalist and multimillionaire Rashaun Williams, now a host on the iconic show Shark Tank, found success by employing a strategy he calls “sneaking into the party.” With few opportunities growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he would insert himself into any event, starting every conversation with “Hear me out.” Williams told Fortune: “I don’t mind cold-calling people
I don’t mind pulling up at conferences.” Google executive Sameer Samat also didn’t achieve success by sitting on the sidelines
He began his meteoric rise in by plucking up the courage to cold- one of the biggest names in his industry: Google cofounder Sergey Brin
At the time Samat was in his twenties, trying to make it in the startup world, when a cofounder at his company Mohomine was weighing leaving the for graduate school
Unsure of how to convince them to stay, he ed Brin at 3 a.m., hoping for some words of wisdom
A mere minute later, Brin replied and invited Samat and his entire team down to Google’s headquarters, interviewing them on the spot
Brin offered Samat a job, but the now executive turned down the opportunity, opting instead to build up his company
Even the CMO of $7.2 billion company Squarespace calls cold-calling employers the “life hack to avoiding long interview cesses.” Years before her success in , Kinjil Mathur spent her summers as a college student skimming telephone books to find the s of es and fessionals in her city
She would go to the company listings section, and started cold-calling es inquiring internships—stating she was even willing to do without a paycheck. “I was willing to work for free; I was willing to work any hours they needed, even on evenings and weekends
I was not focused on traveling,” Mathur told Fortune. “You really have to just be willing to do anything, any hours, any pay, any type of job—just really remain open.” Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world
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