Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Figma's Series B: the L28 engagement chart that clinched the investment
Jul 31, 2025 with Mamoon Hamid
Key Points
- Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid led Figma's Series B in early 2017 after observing a distinctive L28 engagement chart showing users active nearly every working day, a consumer-app retention pattern rare in enterprise software.
- Dylan Field built his cap table with deliberate investor selection per round, pursing Hamid for Series B and Andrew Reed at Sequoia for Series C based on domain expertise rather than availability.
- Figma launched four AI-adjacent products in concentrated pre-IPO period, including Figma Make, which converts text prompts to production-ready code through disciplined timing rather than early AI enthusiasm.
Summary
Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid led Figma's Series B in early 2017, a relationship brokered by John Lilly, who had led the Series A. The introduction came as a professional favor after a separate shared investment had not worked out, with Lilly flagging that Hamid's background in Box, Yammer, and Slack made him a natural fit for a collaboration-native design tool.
At the time of the Series B, Figma had been operating for roughly five years and had just exited beta with early monetization underway. The investment conviction came down to a single metric: the L28 chart, a histogram showing how many days out of a 28-day period each user in the total user base was active. Figma's L28 showed a pronounced uptick at days 14 through 16, indicating a large share of users were opening the product every working day. That pattern, typically associated with consumer apps rather than enterprise software, was the decisive data point.
Hamid draws a direct parallel to Slack's early adoption curve, noting he observed designers using Figma in South Park coffee shops the same way Slack had spread visually through open-plan offices years earlier. A trusted designer contact, Josh Williams, was already an active user, signaling community-level adoption rather than isolated trial.
On early-stage growth metrics, Hamid attributes the concept of the quick ratio to his own thinking roughly a decade ago. The metric compares new users added in a given month against churned users: a ratio of 4 (400 added, 100 lost) signals healthy growth; 200 added against 150 lost flags a structural retention problem. He treats it as a more reliable signal than growth rate alone for early-stage companies, where margins and revenue can swing significantly quarter to quarter.
Dylan Field's approach to building his cap table is described as deliberate and sequenced. Field reportedly had a specific investor in mind for each round based on their domain expertise, actively pursuing Hamid for the B and Andrew Reed (Sequoia) for the Series C with the same intentionality.
Board Additions
Within the month prior to the NYSE listing event, Figma added three independent board members:
- Bill McDermott, current CEO of ServiceNow and former CEO of SAP
- Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and chief product officer at Anthropic
- Luis von Ahn, founder and CEO of Duolingo, also a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company
The additions reflect a deliberate broadening of the board's functional coverage across enterprise software distribution, product design, and AI-native company building.
AI Integration
On the generative AI opportunity, Hamid points to two distinct vectors: AI features embedded within the Figma canvas, and prompt-to-code workflows. The latter is now embodied in Figma Make, the product that takes a text prompt directly to production-ready code. The framing is that timing discipline, not just early enthusiasm for AI, drove the product roadmap, with Figma launching four AI-adjacent products in a concentrated period ahead of the IPO.