Why the Figma IPO turned into a $440 million windfall for a nonprofit

• Figma's IPO is making a lot of money for a lot of people.
• That group also includes a nonprofit: The Marin Community Foundation, which sold shares worth $440 million.
• The nonprofit was reportedly gifted the shares by one of Figma's cofounders.

Wall Street loves Figma's IPO, which is going to make a lot of money for a lot of people — including Dylan Field, the design company's CEO and cofounder. The 33-year-old is now worth billions.

But Figma is also going to be a watershed event for an unlikely beneficiary: The Marin Community Foundation, based just north of San Francisco.

The nonprofit sold 13.4 million Figma shares, worth $33 each, in this week's IPO, which means it would have generated some $440 million. Had it held onto the stock instead, those same shares would be worth $1.4 billion on Thursday, since FIG has more than tripled on its first day of trading.

MCF hadn't owned the shares for very long: The group was gifted them in June by Evan Wallace, another Figma cofounder, Axios reports.

"The privacy of our clients is one of our highest priorities, and as a policy, we do not discuss individual donors," MCF rep Vikki Garrod told me when I asked her about MCF's transaction; Figma declined to comment, and Wallace couldn't be reached for comment.

It seems most likely the money is going to eventually end up in a donor-advised fund, a philanthropic structure that's increasingly popular among the wealthiest people in Silicon Valley.

The basic idea: You hand over your money to a nonprofit, which then manages it for you, and you tell the nonprofit to hand out donations from that fund whenever you want. Some critics of the structure argue that it allows donors to get a tax break without actually requiring them to donate all the money they put into the fund.

The MCF Gift Fund, which owned the Figma shares, "is a mechanism which allows our organization to accept complex gifts, which are liquidated to eventually become the philanthropic capital that donors can use to fulfill their own personal philanthropic ambitions," Garrod says.

As of the end of 2024, MCF was managing $3.5 billion in assets. Looks like that number is going to increase meaningfully.