The 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 persuade 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 Field $100,000 to launch his startup. 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 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, 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.
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 business for help out of the blue—and actually finding success from it.
Venture capitalist and multimillionaire Rashaun Williams, now a host on the iconic investing show Shark Tank, found success by employing a strategy he calls “sneaking into the party.” With few business 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 tech by plucking up the courage to cold-email 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 business for graduate school. Unsure of how to convince them to stay, he emailed 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 processes.” Years before her success in tech, Kinjil Mathur spent her summers as a college student skimming telephone books to find the contacts of businesses and professionals in her city. She would go to the company listings section, and started cold-calling businesses inquiring about 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.”
