Sheila Joglekar Vashee

Former Chief Marketing Officer Figma

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sheila Joglekar Vashee is a consumer and product-led-growth marketer who served as Chief Marketing Officer of Figma from August 2023 until the end of August 2026, a tenure that spanned the design software company’s 2025 New York Stock Exchange listing and its first year as a public company. At Figma she was responsible for marketing, communications, brand design, growth and the customer support organisation. Her career has been built almost entirely inside fast-scaling consumer-facing software businesses — Dropbox through its pre-IPO growth years, Opendoor during its market expansion, and the life insurance company Ethos — after an early stint in investment banking. She is a venture partner at Basis Set Ventures, where she advises early-stage founders on growth and operations, and her public commentary consistently returns to a single argument: that a brand is the sum of every experience people have with a product, not the visual system wrapped around it.

Career Highlights

• Chief Marketing Officer of Figma from August 2023 to the end of August 2026, leading marketing, communications, brand design, growth and customer support (Basis Set Ventures; Marketers That Matter).
• Held the marketing brief through Figma’s 2025 NYSE listing and its first year of public reporting; her departure was announced by chief executive Dylan Field on the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call on 5 August 2026, with Chief Communications Officer Nairi Hourdajian named as her successor.
• Chief Marketing Officer and consumer general manager at Ethos, the life insurance technology company, before joining Figma (Marketers That Matter).
• Vice President of marketing and growth at Opendoor, a period she describes as taking the company from four to twenty-one markets (Basis Set Ventures, her own account).
• Employed at Dropbox across its pre-IPO growth years; Dropbox’s own IPO prospectus records her compensation for 2015, 2016 and 2017 and an equity grant covering 46,652 Class B shares, and describes the role as non-executive (Dropbox Form 424B4, 23 March 2018).
• Venture partner at Basis Set Ventures, advising early-stage companies on growth and operations.
• Began her career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Professional Journey

Vashee started in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, then moved into technology marketing — a switch she has described as a deliberate move toward building rather than advising. Her formative years were at Dropbox, which she joined early and where, by her own account and that of third-party profiles, she was the second marketing hire and helped scale the marketing organisation as the company grew toward a billion dollars in revenue. The campaign most often associated with that period is Dropbox’s “Space Race”, a referral-driven student growth programme. The only primary record of her time there is an unusual one: because she is married to Ajay Vashee, who became Dropbox’s Chief Financial Officer in 2016, her employment was disclosed as a related-party arrangement in the company’s 2018 IPO prospectus, which reports her 2015-2017 compensation and describes her position as non-executive.

From Dropbox she went to Opendoor as vice president of marketing and growth, during the residential real-estate platform’s geographic expansion, and then to Ethos as chief marketing officer and consumer general manager. In August 2023 she joined Figma as Chief Marketing Officer, with a remit unusually wide for the title: alongside marketing and growth she held communications, brand design and the customer support organisation. Her three years there covered the collapse of Figma’s proposed acquisition by Adobe, the company’s independent path to an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025, and the transition to operating as a reporting public company.

That tenure ended in 2026. On Figma’s second-quarter earnings call on 5 August 2026, Dylan Field announced a wider reshaping of the executive team and, within it, that Vashee would depart at the end of that month; Nairi Hourdajian, Figma’s long-serving Chief Communications Officer, took over as CMO. The same call announced the departure of Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita, Kris Rasmussen’s move from Chief Technology Officer to Chief Architect, Dev Akhawe’s appointment as Chief Security Officer, and an expanded product remit for Chief Design Officer Loredana Crisan. No public statement has been found describing what Vashee is doing next; her continuing role as a venture partner at Basis Set Ventures is the only current affiliation confirmed as of this review.

Education

Stanford University

B.A., Economics

University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business

M.B.A.

Both degrees are attested by third-party biographical profiles rather than institutional records, and no graduation years were established.