The Blueprint: Figma x Morgan Stanley

Praveer: We here at Figma believe the process of company building isn't something that's done overnight. It's gonna continue to change and iterate, and you're going to be presented with new opportunities over time. 

One of the superpowers that I've been able to unlock is when I find that partner that can help and guide us in different ways. It’s super empowering to me, as a leader.

Figma is a platform for product development and design teams to come together and build the best world-class products and digital experiences. We are a platform that enables you to bring your designer, your developer, your marketer, your PM, the whole team, to come and coalesce around the ideas that will ultimately become the products of the future.

We grew from about 25 individuals when I joined to, I think, we’re just shy of about 2000 people today.

Shaan: When we started the relationship with Figma, it was a very small company at the time. The beauty of having an integrated firm and Morgan Stanley is there are so many different challenges a company faces. It's not just the IPO but years ahead of that IPO, the employee education on the wealth side, working with Scott and his team to make sure Praveer and his team are ready.

Scott: For Praveer, we focused on private wealth management for the C-suite, financial literacy for the broad population, cap table management for the employee base, and corporate cash for the company. 

And corporate cash is managing excess balance sheet cash, for private and public companies. Every dollar that we can optimize for to then take that and build and help grow the company.

Praveer: They presented to us a number of different ideas just by virtue of understanding our business in really unique ways. 

Scott: When we think about, you know, working with C-Suite, especially with private to public companies, we spend a lot of time on tax trust and estate planning.

Thinking about 10b5-1 trading, so, how much of stock do you wanna sell over the first year. How much liquidity you might need, whether it’s for a home purchase, college savings plans for your kids. Long-term estate planning for your family. Philanthropy is a big part of what we do in donor-advised funds.

We can truly help a company from series A, through their last private round, through IPO and beyond.

Praveer: So what we knew that we were getting with them, was a world class team, a set of individuals that we could really trust during our IPO process. It made our decision pretty easy. 

Shaan: One of the challenges with Figma is that within the community that uses Figma, it's loved, adored and understood, but most investors had never seen Figma.

Praveer: And what that means is when you're in front of an investor trying to show them the full breadth and value of the platform, what we needed to be able to do is to actually take them through that journey.

Shaan: And so uniquely on the IPO, we had a demo team that actually went ahead of the management team in every meeting

They would really take an investor from zero understanding of Figma, to sort of almost an expert by the end and they would build a great piece of software in front of them live so they could see the power of it. And our view that was sort of game changing and just changing the investor knowledge to really get to the harder questions of how big could this company be and how valuable could it be, rather than what do they do? 

Praveer: We spent a lot of time with the team at Morgan Stanley thinking about, who are the right kind of investors that are ultimately gonna become the stable part of our shareholder base for years into the future

What are the back and forth points that we're gonna have with these investors? What are the types of questions that are gonna come up, what are the set of stories that we can bring to them?

Like AI can be an enabler for your business, both to lower the floor while also then raise the ceiling, for individuals to be able to get more craft and value out of the platform. And you're getting a lot more out of that end result.

Praveer: It's been really fun to be able to partner with folks that, you know, have truly become friends.

Shaan: It was a real honor to just be able to advise them through that period, see him grow, see the company grow.

Scott: Seeing Praveer ringing the bell with the Figma team and him throwing the fist pump up, was very special.

Praveer: Morgan Stanley for us over the years has put in the time and effort to, really understand our business and be fantastic partners. It makes me feel ever more confident that I'm doing the right things for Figma when I show up every single day.