Figma’s billionaire CEO Dylan Field cold-emailed his 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 tech “heroes” out to coffee. Now, Figma is a $68 billion success. And multimillionaires and executives at Google and Squarespace have similarly found success the same way.
Job-seekers are all turning to out-of-the-box ways to advance their careers: from delivering donuts to Silicon Valley bosses, to waitressing at tech 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 now-33-year-old CEO was just 19 when he founded the online design tool in 2012—and the aspiring tech entrepreneur pulled on any loose thread he could find to convince others to use it.
“Really, the first users of Figma, a lot of it was cold emailing 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 him $100,000 to launch his start-up. But if it weren’t for his nine-month research 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 business 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 tech talent. If they agreed to hear out his Figma dream, he took them out to coffee and sung his praises of their influence. Surprisingly, in a world of rampant ghosting, a lot of people took the bait.
“I just looked online, like, ‘Who are the designers that I think could be really helpful to us and I respect their work?’ If they answer my email and they let me buy them a coffee, it’ll just be like 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 emails, but they do.”
Fortune reached out to Figma for comment.
Figma’s CEO isn’t the only one admitting to reaching out to the upper echelons of business for help out of the blue—and actually finding success from it.
