Dylan Field

In its second year, the Thiel Fellowship had attracted 500student applicants; 40finalists were named and 20 were ultimately selected.

Dylan Field (born 1992) is an American technology executive and co-founder of Figma, a web-based vector graphics editing software company.

In 2009, Field enrolled at Brown University, where he studied computer science.

Field was an involved member of Brown's computer science department: In 2011, he organized a hackathon in which 150students participated, and starting in late 2011, he co-chaired Brown's CS Departmental Undergraduate Group.

While attending Brown University, Field interned at LinkedIn and the news-sharing startup Flipboard.

At his LinkedIn internship, Field helped devise a social-impact program.

His second summer, he interned as a software engineering intern at Flipboard.

Afterward, Field began to doubt his plan to major in computer science and math, so he took spring semester off during his junior year to pursue a six-month internship at Flipboard in Palo Alto, this time as a technical product manager.

Around that time, Field met Evan Wallace, another computer science undergraduate studying at Brown; the two decided they wanted to start a company together.

One year ahead of Field at Brown, Wallace's studied graphics, and was a teaching assistant in the computer science department.

During a semester away from Brown, Field applied to the Thiel Fellowship, a US$100,000 grant awarded to young entrepreneurs by investor Peter Thiel on the condition that they drop out of college for at least two years.

Field's parents were initially not supportive.

The Thiel Fellowship was begun in 2011.

At the time, the Thiel Fellowship was designed to select 20 "creative and motivated young people" under the age of 20 each year.

Recipients were given $100,000 each to leave college for two years and work on their ideas as startup companies.

Field viewed it as "almost like an independent study, just you don't get course credit, it's a little bit longer and you get paid."

An executive with the Thiel Fellowship commented on their selection of Field: "He has a wonderful blend – he is obviously technically very talented – but he also has a sense of intuition for the art that he will use in his current project, which is blending art and engineering."

Field founded Figma in 2012 with Evan Wallace, who he had met while the two were computer science students at Brown University.

In 2012, Field received a Thiel Fellowship—a $100,000 grant conditioned on his leaving school to begin working full-time on the company.

Field's father told a Santa Rosa area newspaper in 2012 that Dylan found middle school so boring that "he mostly hung out with a janitor, who was kind of a math savant."

Field was interested in computer science from a young age and participated in FIRST Robotics.

He also participated in the arts as a child, acting with credits in TV ads for eToys.com and for Windows XP, and taking an interest in design starting in middle school.

Field attended high school at Technology High School, a magnet school for science, technology, engineering, and math on the campus of Sonoma State University.

While in high school, Field built robots and websites for friends.

He also worked with social media researcher Danah boyd, who ultimately wrote one of Field's letters of recommendation for college.

Field recalled in 2012, "They totally did not want me to apply."

His father told the same interviewer, "Pretty much everything we earned went to education."

Field was awarded the Thiel Fellowship in May2012 and dropped out of Brown to accept it.

Field had originally intended to pursue a degree in math and computer science and graduate after four years.

Field said in a 2012 interview that Brown had been his "dream school" but that he "wasn't feeling like [he] was getting as much out of it as before."

Field said in that interview that he intended to go back to Brown one day, noting the school allowed leaves of absence for up to five years.

Field was named a Thiel Fellow in 2012, earning him $100,000 in exchange for taking a leave of absence from college.

In 2015, Field was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

He is estimated to own 10% of Figma's stock.

Field grew up in Penngrove, California.

He is Jewish.

Field was an only child, named after the poet Dylan Thomas.

His father worked as a respiratory therapist at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and his mother as a resource specialist teacher at Thomas Page Elementary School.

As a child, Field was adept at math, learning algebra at age six.

Field moved to San Francisco with Wallace, where the two spent four years preparing the software for its first public release in 2016.