Reddit is the most human place on the internet, according to Founder and CEO Steve Huffman. In this Blueprint episode, he shares why involving Reddit’s users was central to the company’s IPO. Partnering with Morgan Stanley, Reddit shaped a differentiated investor story that was community-first and brought its moderators into the room. It also offered a Directed Share Program that allowed Reddit users to become real owners of the company.
Steve Huffman: A big reason we wanted to take the company public is because our users and moderators feel this deep sense of ownership over Reddit. And justifiably right – they created Reddit, and we wanted the opportunity for them to be actual owners. And what happened is actually better than we could have even dreamed of.
Reddit is a community of communities. Communities are made of people. And so therefore, Reddit is the most human place on the internet. Reddit is a place powered by people, we should be owned by people. Giving our users and moderators and then just retail investors at large, the ability to own Reddit. I think it very much fits in the Reddit ethos.
We've known the team at Morgan Stanley for a very long time. They've been helpful, shepherding us on growing the business and getting us on the path to go public. (They) understand how Reddit's different. And so they know what the opportunities are and maybe what some of the challenges will be.
Kate Claassen: Every IPO has some really clear selling points, some really clear referendums. We're meeting with investors who have very diverse, investing backgrounds. And so we really focused on being able to tell the story to any type of investor.
Steve Huffman: One of the things that I talked about with our team at Morgan Stanley is I felt like we were getting lumped in with, you know, other kind of similarly scaled ads companies and what Reddit was wasn't coming through.
Kate Claassen: What we did is we brought a number of the mods from communities to Morgan Stanley to meet with investors. This is the first ever investor day prior to a company going public.
The investors left a full day of meetings with more energy and more excitement, which is a feat.
And so being able to lay that foundation was really special and is why we've repeated it for so many others following the innovation for Reddit.
Steve Huffman: I think that was really a turning point in our conversations with investors where they could see that Reddit was a unique thing on the internet.
Kate Claassen: One of the reasons that Morgan Stanley was able to win this IPO is the fact that we're an integrated investment bank. And so the very first conversation that we had with Steve about the IPO, we were talking about Tanya and her team and what she could achieve.
Tanya Hoffman: A directed share program allows an issuer to reserve a portion of the shares during the IPO process and allocate those shares to their employees, friends and family, anyone who's really been instrumental in that IPO journey. And so for Reddit, when we awarded the mandate for the IPO, inviting their community, the user community into the process was very important.
Steve Huffman: And then the IPO, our users got to invest alongside the pros. And I'm so honored we were able to create that opportunity for them.
Tanya Hoffman: With the Reddit story, I think it was so important because we touched so many different parts of the organization, right? So, directed share program, yes. They were also a stock plan client of ours, and then cash management. They were a cash management client. So it really just embodies what the integrated firm can offer them.
Steve Huffman: Preparing to be a public company is a lot of work. Being a public company, we actually really enjoy. Now the tone has completely changed. The moderators are shareholders. They're like, Steve, we want to grow.
Now we're on the same team. And I think that's, it's great for us, it's great for them, it's great for the platform. And I think being public provided that alignment.
Praveer: We here at Figma believe the process of company building isn't something that's done overnight. It's gonna continue to change and iterate, and you're going to be presented with new opportunities over time.
One of the superpowers that I've been able to unlock is when I find that partner that can help and guide us in different ways. It’s super empowering to me, as a leader.
Figma is a platform for product development and design teams to come together and build the best world-class products and digital experiences. We are a platform that enables you to bring your designer, your developer, your marketer, your PM, the whole team, to come and coalesce around the ideas that will ultimately become the products of the future.
We grew from about 25 individuals when I joined to, I think, we’re just shy of about 2000 people today.
Shaan: When we started the relationship with Figma, it was a very small company at the time. The beauty of having an integrated firm and Morgan Stanley is there are so many different challenges a company faces. It's not just the IPO but years ahead of that IPO, the employee education on the wealth side, working with Scott and his team to make sure Praveer and his team are ready.
Scott: For Praveer, we focused on private wealth management for the C-suite, financial literacy for the broad population, cap table management for the employee base, and corporate cash for the company.
And corporate cash is managing excess balance sheet cash, for private and public companies. Every dollar that we can optimize for to then take that and build and help grow the company.
Praveer: They presented to us a number of different ideas just by virtue of understanding our business in really unique ways.
Scott: When we think about, you know, working with C-Suite, especially with private to public companies, we spend a lot of time on tax trust and estate planning.
Thinking about 10b5-1 trading, so, how much of stock do you wanna sell over the first year. How much liquidity you might need, whether it’s for a home purchase, college savings plans for your kids. Long-term estate planning for your family. Philanthropy is a big part of what we do in donor-advised funds.
We can truly help a company from series A, through their last private round, through IPO and beyond.
Praveer: So what we knew that we were getting with them, was a world class team, a set of individuals that we could really trust during our IPO process. It made our decision pretty easy.
Shaan: One of the challenges with Figma is that within the community that uses Figma, it's loved, adored and understood, but most investors had never seen Figma.
Praveer: And what that means is when you're in front of an investor trying to show them the full breadth and value of the platform, what we needed to be able to do is to actually take them through that journey.
Shaan: And so uniquely on the IPO, we had a demo team that actually went ahead of the management team in every meeting
They would really take an investor from zero understanding of Figma, to sort of almost an expert by the end and they would build a great piece of software in front of them live so they could see the power of it. And our view that was sort of game changing and just changing the investor knowledge to really get to the harder questions of how big could this company be and how valuable could it be, rather than what do they do?
Praveer: We spent a lot of time with the team at Morgan Stanley thinking about, who are the right kind of investors that are ultimately gonna become the stable part of our shareholder base for years into the future
What are the back and forth points that we're gonna have with these investors? What are the types of questions that are gonna come up, what are the set of stories that we can bring to them?
Like AI can be an enabler for your business, both to lower the floor while also then raise the ceiling, for individuals to be able to get more craft and value out of the platform. And you're getting a lot more out of that end result.
Praveer: It's been really fun to be able to partner with folks that, you know, have truly become friends.
Shaan: It was a real honor to just be able to advise them through that period, see him grow, see the company grow.
Scott: Seeing Praveer ringing the bell with the Figma team and him throwing the fist pump up, was very special.
Praveer: Morgan Stanley for us over the years has put in the time and effort to, really understand our business and be fantastic partners. It makes me feel ever more confident that I'm doing the right things for Figma when I show up every single day.
Gordy Bunch: When I founded the company, my intention was to take it public, starting with $10,000. No clients, no customers, no employees. Seemed a bit ambitious, but that was our day one goal.
Bunch: TWFG is a high growth insurance distribution platform whereby we help agents open new businesses in the insurance space. Insurance actually is an extension of being a first responder.
When you think about the firemen and the law enforcement and even the Coast Guard and hurricanes and floods, really the insurance is right there alongside them, helping bring capital to the communities, to the families to help them rebuild post-catastrophe.
I met Lauren through our community service.
Lauren Esposito: The relationship with Gordy has been building for years. I think it started when we worked in the township together and were volunteering for the community.
Bunch: The moment I realized that Morgan Stanley could be more than just our personal wealth advisor firm is when we asked for a connection to talk to somebody about a potential IPO.
Esposito: We introduced him to one of our partners in banking, Jyri.
Jyri Wilska: My name’s Jyri Wilska, I run the equity capital markets business for financial institutions for Morgan Stanley.
Bunch: Morgan Stanley's ability to get real time feedback from prospective investors was helping us become better at messaging, how we perceive ourselves, how we communicate. I think that feedback loop is critical.
Wilska: We did a lot of work in terms of trying to analyze where exactly the investor appetite was going to be, where the risks lie. The story we helped craft with TWFG was really attractive to investors, really resonated with them.
Bunch: The outcome of the IPO being able to price above the range, if you were to paint me a picture of what would make me smile, which is something I don’t do often, that outcome certainly would be above my expectations.
There's that trust that Lauren initiated, the trust that that Jryi earned, and that led to additional business that we were able to expand with Morgan Stanley.
We ended up using Morgan Stanley services for our friends and family portion of our IPO, for managing our employee stock plan.
With Lauren, she's taken an interest in our children and so she's working with them on what is it gonna be like for them when they inherit wealth?
It just made so much sense to consolidate all these efforts with the Morgan Stanley organization.
Being a public company is not for the fainted heart. The people I trust, the people who brought us to this point, the people who have proven now even post IPO to be the right team. It was critical for us to maintain that continuity.
Esposito: Working with Gordy, dreaming about an IPO, it's an amazing feeling to get them to that point.
Wilska: It's a privilege to be part of that, but what we really look forward to is building that relationship for the next decades to come.
The IPO, as much as it's a really significant milestone, it's only one marker, and it really is just the beginning of that next stage of their corporate evolution.
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February 2026. CRC #5222287
