Discover how Figma's CFO Praveer Melwani built a world-class finance organization, navigated IPO challenges, and adapted to the AI revolution in enterprise s...
CFO Success: Figma's Praveer Melwani on Leadership, AI, and Going Public
Key Insights
- Career trajectory matters less than learning agility: Success comes from surrounding yourself with advocates, asking the right questions, and viewing yourself as a "constant sponge" for continuous growth
- First-principles thinking beats experience: The best leaders operate unburdened by past decisions, adapting strategies to unique company circumstances rather than replicating what worked elsewhere
- AI fundamentally changes capital allocation: Companies must invest aggressively in new opportunities while maintaining operational efficiency through AI-powered tools and automation
- Long-term tenure creates competitive advantage: Executive teams with 4+ years together develop shared context and business intuition that accelerates decision-making and organizational effectiveness
- Public company readiness is a gradual process: Successful IPO transitions require intentional preparation 2-3 years in advance, not last-minute scrambling
The Path from Finance to CFO: How Praveer Melwani Became One of Tech's Top CFOs
When most people imagine a CFO's journey, they picture an executive who climbed the ladder through experience—perhaps working at three or four different companies, each role building on the last. Praveer Melwani's path to becoming Chief Financial Officer of publicly traded Figma breaks that mold entirely.
Starting his career in investment banking for about 18 months, Melwani jumped into the startup world at Dropbox in late 2013, when the company was experiencing explosive growth. He watched Dropbox scale from 400 to nearly 1,700 employees, gaining invaluable experience in a hypergrowth environment. A brief stint at NerdWallet followed, where he observed a different business model—one built on organic search with impressive 35% EBITDA margins. But something was missing. He wanted more autonomy, more decision-making power, more ownership of outcomes.
This realization led him to deliberately seek Series A opportunities with 25-30 employees. He found Figma at precisely the right moment: the company had just hired its CEO and wasn't yet charging for its product. There were no rigid role expectations, just vast opportunity. "I could immerse myself, be a sponge, and volunteer for any task," he recalls.
What Melwani attributes to his success isn't raw experience or an MBA from a prestigious school. Instead, he emphasizes four critical elements: good luck, proper timing, finding the right company, and leaders willing to invest in him. He highlights Dylan Field, Figma's founder and CEO, as instrumental in his growth. "I was candid about my knowledge and limitations," Melwani explains. "I was empowered to figure things out, which involved asking pertinent questions, recognizing my shortcomings, and surrounding myself with advocates."
This philosophy—that many aspects of leadership can be acquired through deliberate learning, asking the right questions, and maintaining intellectual curiosity—shaped everything that followed. When Figma's COO departed about a year into Melwani's tenure, he seized the opportunity to expand beyond pure finance into operational domains like legal, security, and compliance. Most people would have felt unqualified. Melwani saw it as an exciting challenge.
The turning point for developing talent came when hiring for roles where he lacked deep expertise. His solution: engage extensively with candidates, ask probing questions, and thoroughly understand what each role was meant to solve. The general counsel he hired in 2018-2019 remains in that position today. Through this process, Melwani discovered something crucial about executive leadership: identifying talent requires understanding the actual problem you're solving, not just comparing résumés.
Building World-Class Finance Through First-Principles Leadership
As Figma scaled, Melwani's approach to finance evolved beyond traditional CFO responsibilities. He recognized that merely managing budgets and compliance wasn't the highest value he could provide. Instead, he focused on becoming what he calls a "strategic arm of the company," deeply understanding the unique drivers behind business metrics.
His philosophy on executive leadership is uncompromising: if you're just staring at P&Ls without understanding what's driving them, you're not doing your job. You're a "traffic cop," approving or denying decisions without strategic insight. True CFO excellence comes from intellectual curiosity and a hunger to ask second and third-order questions.
Melwani's favorite part of his week? Self-serve deep dives where the team analyzes all funnel indicators and live experiments. These meetings allow him to slice and dice the business in multiple directions, identify unfavorable trends, and push for rapid action. This requires maintaining detailed dashboards and refreshing data personally—not to micromanage, but to bring informed perspective to conversations. When operating at surface level, he pushes the team deeper.
The finance organization he built at Figma operates with a specific mandate: be a business accelerator and problem-solver, not a gatekeeper. This cultural shift requires hiring people who think entrepreneurially, who ask the right questions, and who view themselves as part of the company's growth engine rather than its compliance department.
When evaluating VPs and senior finance leaders, Melwani looks for first-principles thinkers above all else. He doesn't care if someone has done something eight times before if it's not right for Figma's current circumstances. Experience without adaptability is a liability. He seeks people who can live in the details without getting lost in them, who build community and think team-first, and who understand that being a leader means deeply comprehending the work—not just managing other managers.
The question of whether to promote from within or hire external executives has been central to Figma's leadership strategy. Melwani has a clear bias toward internal promotion when possible. He's seen repeatedly how shared understanding and business context make leaders dramatically more effective. Many of his leadership team have been promoted over time, benefiting from the organizational knowledge they've accumulated.
However, he's candid about the challenges: sometimes individuals don't grow as fast as the organization needs them to. The rate of change required might exceed their learning curve. In these situations, Melwani advocates for clear-eyed decision-making and swift action. Staying the course out of comfort is often easier than making tough personnel changes, but when staying the course contradicts business needs, leaders must act decisively.
AI, Capital Allocation, and Redefining the CFO Role in 2025
The post-ChatGPT moment has fundamentally altered how Melwani thinks about capital allocation, risk-taking, and the CFO's evolving role. When he joined Figma, he observed what seemed like a linear trajectory: more software would be created over time, and demand would grow steadily. Today, with AI-powered coding agents making software creation dramatically easier, that trajectory is "near asymptotic."
This shift has profound implications for Figma's strategy. If vastly more people will participate in software creation, the competitive advantage no longer comes from making design accessible—that's table stakes. Instead, design craft and design point of view become the differentiator. This insight fundamentally changed how Melwani approaches investment strategy.
One year ago, Figma operated with 90%+ gross margins. In Q4, they intentionally reduced gross margins to 86% to invest in AI products and services. This five-point reduction wasn't a failure—it was strategic. By servicing AI products effectively, they widened the aperture of who could participate in design. This willingness to sacrifice short-term profitability for long-term opportunity positioning represents a major shift in how Melwani thinks about financial stewardship.
Beyond product strategy, AI is revolutionizing how finance itself operates. Melwani is experimenting with external AI agents that ingest organizational information to help with better first drafts, with entirely new forecasting methodologies, and with approaches that would have seemed impossible just months ago. Legacy spreadsheet-based forecasting is being replaced by concurrent multiple forecasting models: one using external public data for outside-in perspective, one using internal proprietary data, and one providing detailed driver-level analysis. These different contexts, enabled by AI tools, produce better outcomes than any single approach.
This capability shift changes everything about being a world-class CFO. If you're not integrating and leveraging modern tools, you're likely to be left behind. This isn't just about adoption for adoption's sake—it's about recognizing that your current methodologies might not get you to the next stage. Risk tolerance, the ability to refine quickly, and willingness to experiment become more important than ever. Constraints remain necessary, but they must allow room for failure and learning.
Regarding bet-sizing and investment strategy, the calculus has changed dramatically. Melwani wants Figma to take more bets, not fewer. The cost to build has dropped significantly. The company has a large active user base to experiment with. The bottleneck today isn't whether they have enough ideas or resources to build—the bottleneck is building with the right leadership, thoughtfulness, and resourcing.
Melwani demonstrated this philosophy by doubling Figma's product portfolio in a single year, going from four to eight products. They built Figma Make (their prompt-to-prototype tool) in just 2-3 months, moved from beta to general availability in about five months, and by the end of Q4, 50% of their 100,000+ customers were creating with Make weekly. This speed and velocity wouldn't be possible without a willingness to take more calculated risks while maintaining quality and thoughtful product design.
The organization has relaxed some previous constraints on spending and investment. While they maintain guardrails—you need guardrails to operate effectively—they've consciously decided not to constrain themselves in ways that would prevent them from pursuing the multiplied opportunity ahead. This represents a fundamental departure from how many CFOs operate, especially at mature companies.
Nine Years with Dylan Field: How Long-Term CEO-CFO Partnerships Create Competitive Advantage
One of the most striking aspects of Melwani's tenure at Figma is his nine-year partnership with founder and CEO Dylan Field. In Silicon Valley, where executives commonly change roles every 2-4 years, this consistency is rare enough to be noteworthy. But it's also, Melwani argues, a significant competitive advantage for the company.
Working with the same founder and CEO for nearly a decade builds "incredible levels of trust." You quickly understand their perspective, priorities, and decision-making patterns. This understanding affords Melwani significant autonomy—he knows which decisions to take independently and which to involve Dylan in. The deep trust, combined with an assumption of good intent, removes the anxiety about whether the CEO likes you or not. Both operate from the same context, aiming to make the company the best it can be.
Beyond trust, long tenure creates the ability to call each other out and give candid feedback. These insights come from shared context, which Melwani believes is "immensely valuable" in an industry where people frequently change roles. Many of his executive team have been together for 4+ years—something rare at great publicly traded software companies. The majority have gone through major life events together: marriages, children, growth of the company. They've built shared history.
Remarkably, everyone on Melwani's leadership team is in their current role for the first time, except for one person. This might seem like a liability—lack of prior executive experience. But Melwani sees it differently. When people come in with no prior mold to fit, they learn without assumptions. There's no "that's how we did it at my last company" mentality. Everyone has a shared understanding that deep, hands-on involvement is essential to organizational success. This ability and desire to go deep is genuinely unique to Figma's leadership team because they've all grown up in the organization together.
The personal side matters too. Melwani wants everyone in his organization to feel empowered and motivated, capable of building generational companies. He's intentional about creating opportunities for people to grow their careers, expand their professional networks, and learn from one another. Many people on his team have become life-long friends, not just colleagues.
IPO Readiness: The Three-Year Journey from Strategy to Public Company
When Melwani was first asked about going public, he admits internal stakeholders didn't truly understand the level of effort required. The IPO checklist felt like an exercise they'd eventually do, not something urgent. That changed in early 2022 when it became clear going public was "an inevitable outcome, an inevitable place we'd like to go."
Interestingly, this realization coincided with Melwani stepping into the full CFO role. His first conversation with Dylan was straightforward: "Here are the people I need to hire who will be important in driving this process forward." He identified critical hires: an IR leader, a controller, a tax leader, and other roles essential to public company operations. People and process were where he started, not policies and procedures.
Then came the Adobe acquisition attempt in August 2022. The company went through extensive due diligence, hired teams in preparation, and found themselves thinking: if this acquisition happens, we'd have to integrate into Adobe's closing process. But they also realized something valuable: they could use the framework required for that integration as a template for eventual public company operations. When the deal terminated in December 2023, the organization had already begun building essential infrastructure.
2024 became the year they got truly serious. They introduced mock earnings calls, began engaging with public market investors, and conducted a larger secondary round bringing on sophisticated investors like Fidelity and GIC who would later anchor the IPO. That's when the preparation accelerated.
Melwani is thoughtful about whether the timeline was right. For Figma, he believes they absolutely needed that multi-year runway. Had they tried too early, they would have introduced unnecessary process. For example, they hired an internal audit leader in late 2024. Had she come on board earlier, what would she actually have accomplished? Would they want compliance frameworks potentially slowing the business before they were genuinely needed? Probably not.
The patience paid off in efficiency. When they engaged bankers, advisors, and lawyers, they executed with remarkable speed. From organizational meeting to confidential filing: approximately four weeks. From confidential filing to IPO: roughly three and a half months. This compressed timeline was possible only because they'd completed much preliminary work in the years prior.
There's a subtle benefit to being public that many overlook: increased degrees of freedom in challenging moments. Private companies with annual tender windows face a vulnerability: if performance lags, employees hold illiquid equity that might not be valuable. They're more likely to lose talent. Public companies, even with depressed stock prices, offer more options for liquidity and equity incentives. A public company with good people has a better chance of improving and evolving than a private company stuck in a difficult period.
What World-Class CFO Excellence Actually Looks Like
The gap between doing a good job and doing a world-class job isn't about better Excel skills or more detailed financial models. It's about intellectual curiosity and the willingness to ask second and third-order questions. Many CFOs get stuck staring at P&Ls and income statements without understanding the unique drivers beneath them. That's not excellence—that's traffic cop work.
Done well, a finance organization becomes a strategic arm of the company, helping leadership understand when to make long-term investment decisions. This only happens if the CFO maintains hunger, excitement, and passion for going deeper to understand root causes.
Melwani's approach to team development reflects this philosophy. He doesn't just review final forecasts—he wants to understand methodologies, dig into underlying spreadsheets, and build his own mental model. He won't click through every cell the way he used to, but he'll identify areas that seem off and require analysis. You need good judgment about where to focus attention. Chasing perfection on something that doesn't matter is a poor use of time. But delving into high-impact details that influence the overall framework? That's an extremely valuable investment of leadership time.
This judgment about what deserves deep analysis versus what can be delegated comes with time. It's something Melwani actively teaches his team. He encourages everyone in his organization—not just finance, but corporate development, business operations, and accounting—to view themselves as business accelerators and problem-solvers. It's not about being gatekeepers or "go/no-go" decision-makers. These should be the people everyone wants in the room because they bring creativity and help solve problems.
When Melwani talks about what truly differentiates leaders, he keeps returning to one theme: shared business context and judgment developed over time. If he were to leave Figma tomorrow and join another organization, he'd have to rebuild that trust, context, and understanding from scratch. It would take years. That's what makes long tenure valuable—not just relationships, but the sheer business context and gut feeling you develop about where critical issues lie and what's truly necessary for success.
Hiring and Developing Exceptional Teams
Much of Melwani's success traces back to hiring good people. When he joined the technology industry from banking, he was part of a program that pulled people from banking, venture capital, hedge funds, and other industries. None of them had done "this thing" before, so there was no predetermined path. What mattered was finding intellectually curious people who asked the right questions and genuinely cared about building great organizations and great businesses.
That same philosophy guides his current hiring. He wants business accelerants—people who can unblock the rest of the organization. He wants them to learn about go-to-market strategy, how to integrate acquired businesses, how to forge thoughtful partnerships. His goal is to develop well-rounded leaders, whether they continue at Figma or move elsewhere. He's indifferent about their ultimate destination; he wants everyone to feel capable of building well-rounded experiences and then advocating for one another.
When looking at direct reports—VPs and SVPs—Melwani identifies several essential threads: first-principles thinking above all else, ability to live in the details without losing sight of the forest, genuine investment in building community and organizations, and willingness to think team-first instead of individual. These aren't nice-to-have traits; they're directly tested for in the hiring process.
His bias toward promoting from within is strong but not absolute. He's seen tremendous benefits from shared understanding and context, and many of his leaders have been promoted over time. But he's clear-eyed about when promotion isn't working. If someone isn't growing as fast as the organization needs, if their rate of change doesn't keep up with business evolution, it's time to make a change. Being decisive about these situations is harder than staying the course, but it's necessary.
When hiring external leaders, Melwani has learned that context-building is crucial. The more information you can give an external hire before they start, the better. He recalls a hiring process with one leader that took about nine months—an eternity in startup time. But during that time, they shared complete data dumps from various parts of their Salesforce instance, giving the candidate time to internalize and understand the organization. This head start meant they could operate effectively from day one rather than spending the first three to six months learning from scratch.
This approach is counterintuitive. It might decrease your close rate in the short term because candidates need so much information and face rigorous vetting. But it dramatically increases the likelihood of long-term success. It requires vulnerability—being willing to share fully rather than hiding information. It also requires patience, accepting that sometimes it's better to move more slowly upfront than to hire quickly and fail.
The Figma Advantage: A Unique Executive Team
What makes Figma's executive team different from other great teams at publicly traded software companies? According to Melwani, it boils down to tenure and shared history. The majority of the team has 4+ years of tenure together. That's rare. Many people assume executives turn over quickly, and often they do. But this team has stayed together through significant growth, industry changes, and organizational challenges.
Even more interesting: everyone on the team is in their current role for the first time, except one person. They all came up through the organization together. They all have no prior mold to fit. They came in unburdened by "that's how we did it before," which Melwani sees as surprisingly beneficial. They learned without assumptions, developed perspectives based on Figma's unique circumstances, and built a shared understanding of what the organization needs.
Beyond the professional dimensions, many team members have experienced major life events together. They've gotten married, had children, developed strong personal connections alongside their working relationships. This human element creates bonds that transcend typical corporate relationships. It's been genuinely cool to see come together.
The Modern CFO's Imperative: Continuous Learning and Adaptation
As Melwani reflects on his journey from individual contributor in BizOps to public company CFO, he emphasizes one consistent theme: the methods and tools required to do the job keep evolving. How he learns has changed dramatically over nine years, partly due to new tools available. He recently experimented with an external AI agent created by his business operations leader that ingests organizational information to help generate better first drafts. He spent part of his weekend just playing with it, realizing how different his starting context is now compared to even six months ago.
He actively seeks out experts and peers who've solved problems before. But he's learned it's not enough to just ask for advice—you need deep understanding of your own business to make sense of that advice. What he finds most helpful is using other leaders as thought partners. When you provide full context, conversations become richer back-and-forth exchanges rather than one-way advice-giving. These relationships become "living, breathing organisms," almost like creating an internal peer group or board of advisors.
The specific approach Melwani takes: focus on the questions you're asking and the problems you're trying to solve. Understand your business deeply so you can evaluate advice critically. This discipline of asking the right questions and involving the right people becomes core to executive effectiveness.
Conclusion
Praveer Melwani's journey from finance analyst to public company CFO offers a masterclass in growth through learning, adaptation, and deep organizational impact. His success wasn't predetermined by an Ivy League degree or previous CFO experience. It came from intellectual curiosity, a willingness to ask "why" multiple times, and the ability to develop deep business judgment over time.
In the post-AI world, his insights about financial leadership are increasingly relevant: the CFOs who thrive will be those who adopt new tools aggressively, maintain intellectual rigor about business drivers, think first-principles about capital allocation, and develop teams of accelerators rather than gatekeepers. Most importantly, they'll be the leaders willing to learn continuously, adapt their approaches, and view themselves as perpetual students of their business.
For aspiring CFOs and finance leaders, Melwani's message is clear: focus on being a strategic problem-solver, build teams of intellectually curious people, develop deep business context over time, and never stop asking better questions. That's what separates good CFOs from world-class ones.
Original source: Figma’s CFO on going public, AI, and working alongside Dylan Field | Praveer Melwani
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