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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#771

Post by scarface_74 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #591
itishappy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Your quote is an example of the exact ideology that leads to Standard Oil and company towns.

What is that ideology? "Government shouldn't be involved unless there's a great reason to do so"? If you think preventing company towns isn't a great reason to need approval, fair enough, but then why are you saying company towns are bad?

So exactly how was the government preventing a company town here?

And if a town is dependent on one major employee should we do what exactly?

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#772

Post by matthewowen »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #719
matthewowen wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself and not for Figma and I wouldn’t want to muddy that fact or imply that I have meaningful non-public information. I don’t think anything I’ve said is either vociferous or disingenuous. I actually haven’t even said whether or not I agree with the decision or whether or not I think the timeline is reasonable (in the sense of whether the benefits and needs of the timeline justify the cost of it), so t…

You have meaningful non-public motive: probable millions to earn if this deal for through.

This deal already has fallen through. What I type here has no possible impact. So idk what the motive here really is.

I have a bunch of different feelings about it of course, but I think what I have said here has been factual and verifiable against public information.

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about hacker news is that it isn’t purely a peanut gallery and people involved in the companies and technologies we talk about do post here. Attributing bad faith to those people when they do participate seems antithetical to the spirit of this place.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#773

Post by codeptualize »

mortenjorck wrote: post #520
codeptualize wrote: post #126

That is wild. It's a good thing as it means Adobe won't ruin Figma like they did with so many great software products before, but just imagine founders, investors and employees, thinking they had a really good exit.. That must hurt, I hope they can stay motivated. If Adobe can't buy them, what other exit options do they have? Go public?

I doubt we'll see anything in the next 12-18 months, but at some point in 2025-26 I would expect one of the following, in order of likelihood: 1. Microsoft acquisition 2. IPO 3. Salesforce acquisition The above are also in descending order of valuation. Adobe's $20B was pure pandemic-bubble premium; I doubt MSFT would pay much over half that, Salesforce less still, with an IPO somewhere in the middle. The more intere…

1 & 3 would be horrible as well.. I think they would ruin it properly.

Indeed, Adobe's actions will be interesting. They will have to compete, maybe they can buy Sketch or similar?

And they might also just want out of the $20B price tag as you are right that it's a crazy price today.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#775

Post by vlovich123 »

I think this is great. Figma gets a free undiluted infusion of 1B cash. I’m surprised break-up fees aren’t negotiated as an investment instead of a pure cash transfer. Sure it may have impacted company focus, it didn’t impact their revenue that much (1.5x growth vs 2x growth in previous years although that could have also been caused by an adverse economic climate with sales slowing across many companies and industries). The one-time 1B infusion puts their revenue growth quite a bit higher for 2023 than they would have had organically I suspect (4x growth vs best case of 2x). If Figma fixes their sales trajectory in 2024 this bodes extremely well for them. They do need to have a better story about generative AI which is a real thing in their space (e.g. wireframe -> mockup automatic conversion, wireframe construction assistants, etc etc). Will be interesting to see if they build that in-house or via acquisition.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#776

Post by ThomPete »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #733
ThomPete wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to segment it into the verticals. Canva is 5 times bigger if not more than Adobe Express which is the equivalent. Substance is miniscule in the 3d market compared to Max, Softimage, Maya etc. Adobe is big because of the many vertical they are in, not because they own them.

This is a well rehearsed segmentation game that market leaders like to play until even the biggest companies on earth no longer appear to be dominant in any specific segment. I don't buy it. It's not just about indvidual verticals in their current state. For these conglomerates it's always about buying rising competitors out of the market before they can become a strategic threat. Figma could have expanded beyond any…

You don't have to buy it. That's the reality. You can go through the numbers yourself.

Adobe doesn't have network effect or anything like that.

Just to give you the numbers:

Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes Photoshop, has over 22 million subscribers.

Thats 1/5 of Canva users.

You guys are simply factually wrong.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#777

Post by coldtea »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #624
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma Unlikely. Based on the google trends [1], Figma sees around 10x more traffic than Firefly, but more importantly it experiences severe weekend drop-offs, meaning people are using it for work. Firefly on the other hand has a constant amount of attention, in line with people playing around with it but not committing to it for serious projects. An…

Things happen quickly and AI will change things quickly. Figma is nearly 8 years old and Firefly isn't even a year old. Of course a massive tool is going to be bigger than a very new tool and there is a lot of momentum at companies. The future is going to be AI/prompt based because it's a 100x speed savings. Who wins that pie is up for debate but Figma as it stands right now is very disruptable.

>Things happen quickly and AI will change things quickly.

Yes, but oversold hype also dies quickly, not changing much in the end.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#778

Post by npunt »

havefunbesafe wrote: post #722
lewisjoe wrote: post #525

I'm wondering why is there zero competition for Figma? I understand their app is basically a browser-like engine running inside the browser - which is cutting-edge tech, tough to copy, etc. But given enough interest in this space and the valuation Figma has now - I'm wondering why isn't other big tech companies not building their own Figma alternatives.

I'd direct you to Figma's incredibly impressive patent portfolio https://patents.justia.com/assignee/figma-inc

That's like 7 patents, not sure it's particularly impressive from a tech patent portfolio perspective unless a few of them are real bangers, and/or Figma is known to be litigious which I don't think they are?

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#779

Post by parentheses »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #643
RickS wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(ex-Adobe, on a team highly related to an area where Figma out-executed XD, less knowledge about genAI stuff) > Adobe has probably captured back both mental and market share from Figma GenAI/Firefly's success is in a totally different domain to what Figma's doing. Figma's equivalent at Adobe is XD, which has never held a candle to Figma. The existential problem Adobe tried to buy their way out of still exists in the…

> (which is part of the basis of Firefly's success – significantly cleaner legal provenance on their training data). Yeah... I mean the pre-trained text encoder Firefly uses is filled with copyrighted, unlicensed-for-express-purpose training data. Firefly is successful in the same sense that DocuSign is, in that it is selling a holistic social experience, but I think maybe don't opine on "legal provenance on their tr…

I think this shows that you don't fully understand UI/UX and its importance/role in modern software creation. Moreover, you're conflating your opinions about Spotify with an industry. This would explain what I consider to be an mis assessment of the situation.

As someone close to UX my entire life, Figma is a well positioned and useful app that has no decent substitute on the Adobe side. It has market share and potentially a huge data moat giving them a leg up on the "AI Designer" problem. Now more than ever, it is worth a lot.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#780

Post by scarface_74 »

edouard-harris wrote: post #94
scarface_74 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired. Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public. The VC market will dry up even more if they see their chances of an exit diminishing because of an overzealous government.

> The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired. Certainly not in terms of expectation value. Most of the value of a startup at any given funding round is driven by the possibility of a public listing. This is true even though most successful startup outcomes are acquisitions. > Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public. The correct number is 18, not 5. [1]…

So instead of .125% of companies. It’s .45%.

The best I could find is that YC has invested in 4000 companies..

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