Hey there, future private market millionaires!

Alberto here with your Sunday dose of startup wisdom. This week's been absolutely wild in the investment world, and I'm buzzing to share what just went down with Figma's IPO – because this story holds some serious lessons for anyone looking to build wealth through private market investing.

Read time: 4 min 23 sec 🕒

Figma just exploded onto the NYSE, jumping 250% in its debut after raising $1.2 billion. Let me put this in perspective for you: they were priced at $33 per share and ended up with a $19.3 billion valuation. That's not just impressive – that's the kind of life-changing return that makes venture capitalists retire early.

But here's the kicker that should get your attention: the IPO was more than 40 times oversubscribed, with more than half of the orders receiving no stock. Translation? Institutional investors were fighting tooth and nail to get a piece of this action, while regular folks were completely locked out.

Figma's venture capital backers are now sitting on $24 billion worth of stock after this massive pop. These aren't lottery winners – they're smart money that identified a winner years ago when Figma was just another design tool competing with Adobe.

Think about it: while you were using Figma to create presentations or mockups, VCs were writing checks and securing their financial futures. The company showed 50% year-over-year revenue growth and hit profitability in Q1 2025 with $44.9 million in net income. The signs were there for anyone paying attention to the private markets.

Here's the brutal truth: By the time companies like Figma go public, the biggest gains are already locked up by venture capitalists and private market investors.

The 250% pop? That's just the appetizer. The real feast happened during the private funding rounds when smart money got in early.

You don't need to quit your day job or become a full-time VC to access these opportunities. You just need to know where to look and have the right connections to quality deal flow.

Before the $20B Adobe deal (that didn’t go through).
Before the IPO.
Figma had some of the most competitive VC rounds in Silicon Valley history.

I pulled the investor list using Harmonic, my go-to startup discovery engine.

Here are the key names that got in early 👇

VC Funds
▫️ Sequoia Capital
▫️ Index Ventures
▫️ Greylock Partners
▫️ Andreessen Horowitz
▫️ Founders Fund (Peter Thiel)
▫️ ICONIQ
▫️ Thrive Capital
▫️ Coatue
▫️ General Catalyst
▫️ IVP
▫️ Kleiner Perkins
▫️ Flat Capital AB
▫️ LocalGlobe

Figma isn't an outlier – it's following the exact same playbook we've seen with every major tech success story. Remember when Airbnb went public and jumped 113% on day one? Or when Snowflake popped 165%? The pattern is crystal clear: the companies changing the world get discovered by private investors years before retail investors even hear their names.

The smartest money doesn't wait for CNBC headlines or IPO bells. They're writing checks when these companies are still figuring out product-market fit, still operating out of cramped offices, still unknown to 99% of the investing public. That's where the real money gets made.

At FoundersCrowd, we're democratizing access to the same private market deals that made Figma's early investors incredibly wealthy. We curate opportunities from promising startups before they hit the public markets, giving our community the chance to invest alongside seasoned professionals.

Ready to stop watching from the sidelines while others build generational wealth? We're launching something very special for a select group of our community members. If you're serious about private market investing, you'll want to be part of our VIP community first, but you need to qualify.

Fill out our qualification form to see if you're ready to join the ranks of private market investors who spot the next Figma before it becomes front-page news.