In this latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Praveer Melwani, CFO at Figma. Praveer joined Figma in 2017 as the company's first business operations and finance hire—when the team was around 30 people and not yet charging for the product—and stepped into the CFO seat in 2022, helping to lead the company’s IPO in 2025. In today’s conversation, Praveer breaks down the step functions that took him from IC to CFO, why Figma started acting like a public company three years before IPO, and how AI is rewriting capital allocation and the CFO job itself.
In today's episode, we discuss:
What separates a world-class finance leader from a traffic-cop CFO
How Praveer went from Figma's first biz ops hire to CFO of a public company in nine years
Why Figma started acting like a public company three years before its IPO
What Praveer has learned working alongside Dylan Field for nine years
Why Figma intentionally cut its 90% gross margin to invest in AI
References:
Adobe: https://www.adobe.com
Brendan Mulligan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmulligan
Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com
Dylan Field: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/
Fidelity: https://www.fidelity.com
Figma: https://www.figma.com
GIC: https://www.gic.com.sg
NerdWallet: https://www.nerdwallet.com
Shaunt Voskanian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shauntvoskanian/
Where to find Praveer:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/praveer-melwani
Where to find Brett:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital:
Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
02:13 From banking to Dropbox to Figma
04:14 The phase shift when Figma's COO left
05:36 Hiring leaders in functions you don't understand
07:18 Selling the exec team on AI consumption pricing
09:48 Using Claude Code to learn new things as CFO
11:36 Building an internal board of peer CFOs
13:52 Inside Figma's CFO job description
16:38 What separates good CFOs from world-class CFOs
18:42 Capital allocation and risk in a post-ChatGPT world
21:45 Why Praveer wants to take more bets
24:32 How AI is materially changing the CFO role
25:36 The nine-year working relationship with Dylan Field
29:12 How deeply in the details should a CFO be?
31:47 What Dropbox taught Praveer about building strong teams
33:24 Praveer’s first-principles test for hiring VPs
38:47 Why Figma acted like a public company in 2022
