Claire Butler

Claire Butler joined Figma as their first ever marketing hire when it was a 10-person stealth startup, built the bottom-up growth motion from scratch, and has stayed for eight-plus years as it grew to a valuation exceeding $10 billion -- giving her the full arc of a PLG-to-enterprise journey. Their core argument: Build bottom-up with practitioners first. Figma had no sales team for the first three years -- all revenue was self-serve. The evidence is specific: Figma at Microsoft: Patient zero signed up organically; spread through node graphs of collaborator invitations across the organization; Microsoft eventually came to Figma asking for enterprise procurement, security, and account management. Furthermore, claire's scrappy early sales: 'I slid into the DMs of my friend's ex-boyfriend' to get the first meeting with Microsoft -- the ultimate bottom-up hustle. Three years of no sales team: all revenue was self-serve via credit cards, with individual contributors and managers as the buyers. In Claire Butler's own words: "We actually didn't have a sales team for the first three years. So all of our revenue, it was paid, but it was all self-serve. And so we'd work with these... The individual contributor or maybe the manager would just put them on their credit card. That was the way that things grew." (Explaining Figma's early self-serve only model.)