Figma

SpaceX

Figma

Figma uses a freemium model. Individual designers can use Figma for free with up to three active projects.

Teams pay per editor per month — $15/month for the Professional tier and $75/month for the Organization tier. Viewers are always free, which was revolutionary.

In Sketch, if a developer wanted to inspect a design, they needed a license. In Figma, you just send them a link.

This "free viewers, paid editors" model was genius because it turned every designer into a distribution channel. A designer joins a company, uses Figma, invites 50 engineers and PMs to view files, and suddenly the whole company is embedded in the Figma ecosystem.

When decision-makers see everyone already using it, upgrading to a paid team plan is automatic.

Revenue grew from essentially nothing in 2018 to over $600 million ARR by 2023. The company was profitable by mid-2022 — unusual for a venture-backed startup.

They achieved this without a massive enterprise sales team. The product spread bottom-up through organizations, designer by designer, team by team.

SpaceX

SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.

A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which is now generating over $6 billion in annual revenue from 4+ million subscribers.

Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.

The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.

SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.

That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.

Figma

Dylan Field dropped out of Brown University in 2012 after interning at Flipboard and winning a Thiel Fellowship — Peter Thiel's program that pays students $100,000 to leave college and start something. His co-founder Evan Wallace was a Brown classmate and graphics programming wizard who'd built impressive WebGL demos that proved browsers could handle complex visual work.

Their original idea wasn't even a design tool. Field initially wanted to build a flight search engine, then pivoted to drone photography, before landing on the insight that would define Figma: professional creative tools were stuck in the desktop era while everything else had moved to the cloud.

Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch — all required downloads, all worked on local files, and none of them let two people work on the same file simultaneously.

The technical challenge was enormous. Nobody believed you could build a high-performance vector graphics editor that ran entirely in a web browser.

Field and Wallace spent three years — 2012 to 2015 — just building the rendering engine before they had a product anyone could use. They basically had to invent new technology for browser-based graphics processing.

The first public beta launched in December 2015, and designers immediately noticed something no other tool offered: real-time multiplayer editing, like Google Docs but for design.

SpaceX

In 2001, Elon Musk had just sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and was sitting on roughly $180 million after taxes. Most people would buy an island.

Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.

He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.

On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.

The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.

SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.

He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.

It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.

Figma

Figma grew almost entirely through product-led growth — the product was so good and so easy to share that it spread virally through design teams. Every shared Figma link was marketing.

Every viewer who saw a design file in their browser without downloading anything was a conversion event.

The "free viewers" decision was the single most important growth lever. Traditional design tools charged per seat.

Figma said: only editors pay, everyone else is free. This removed all friction from collaboration and meant that for every paying designer, there might be 10-20 free viewers — all of whom experienced the product and became advocates.

Community was the second engine. Figma's open plugin system and free template marketplace created an ecosystem that locked in users.

Designers built their workflows around Figma-specific plugins, teams built design systems in Figma components, and switching costs climbed. By 2022, Figma had become the default — not just a design tool, but the operating system for product design.

SpaceX

SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.

They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.

SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.

Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.

They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.

It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.

Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.

By 2024, Starlink had over 4 million subscribers and was generating billions in revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.

Figma

The Adobe acquisition saga was the biggest test. In September 2022, Adobe announced it would acquire Figma for $20 billion — the largest private software acquisition ever proposed.

Designers panicked. Would Adobe kill Figma's culture?

Bloat it with features? Integrate it into Creative Cloud and ruin the simplicity?

The deal fell apart in December 2023 when European regulators signaled they'd block it on antitrust grounds. Adobe walked away and paid a $1 billion breakup fee.

Figma was independent again — but now had to prove it could grow into a $20 billion company on its own.

Competition is intensifying. Canva is pushing into professional design.

Adobe is rebuilding its own collaborative tools. And newer entrants are using AI to generate designs automatically, potentially reducing the need for traditional design tools altogether.

Figma's challenge is staying ahead in a market it created while expanding into adjacent categories like presentations, whiteboarding, and development handoff.

SpaceX

The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.

The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.

The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.

If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.

Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.

Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.

The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.

He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.

But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.

Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.

Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.

Figma

Figma Design — the core browser-based interface design tool with real-time multiplayer collaboration, component libraries, auto-layout, and prototyping. FigJam — a collaborative whiteboard for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning that competes with Miro and Mural.

Dev Mode — a workspace specifically for developers to inspect designs, extract code snippets, and understand spacing and styling without bothering designers. Figma Slides — presentation software launched in 2024 that lets teams build slide decks using the same design tools and component libraries.

Community — a marketplace of free and paid design templates, plugins, and UI kits created by designers worldwide.

SpaceX

Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.

Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.

It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — over 6,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries.

Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It's still in testing but has already completed a full flight.

Figma

Index Ventures led the Series A and has been involved in nearly every round. Greylock Partners was an early backer.

Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in growth rounds. Addition (Lee Fixel's fund) led the Series E that valued Figma at $10 billion.

The final private round in 2024, after the Adobe deal collapsed, reportedly valued Figma at $12.5 billion. Peter Thiel was indirectly connected through the Thiel Fellowship that funded Dylan Field's early journey.

SpaceX

Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a]6z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)