Figma

Figma is the collaborative design platform that made every other design tool feel like drafting with stone tablets. It started when Dylan Field and Evan Wallace—Harvard dropouts who basically said "screw the degree, we're building something that matters"—looked at design software and realized everything was clunky, siloed, and locked to expensive licenses. So they built Figma to run in a browser. That one decision broke the entire industry open.

Designers, engineers, product managers, and marketers all work in the same file. Real-time. Simultaneously. There's no "sending the latest version" or "can you export that?" It's the closest thing to telepathy in software. Every user in an organization buys in because everyone's already collaborating there—the network effect is the actual product.

Adobe tried to buy them for $20 billion in 2023. When the deal collapsed, Figma kept walking. Then Adobe came back and acquired them for $4.12 billion in 2024. That's not a bail-out. That's a flex. Figma turned a browser-based side project into the standard for how modern products get designed, and Adobe knew they couldn't compete without owning it.