Figma files for proposed IPO

Not really, I’m not thinking to replace CMS builders like Wix or Squarespace either.

More like ”no-code design directly in HTML and CSS”, but with familiar Figma/Sketch-line controls for sizing, alignment, etc. Responsive by default, boxes full-width and vertically sized by content by default, manual pixel sizing of elements heavily discouraged in favor of block/inline-block/inline. Sane defaults for theme tokens, but easily customizable.

In other words, a hands-on design tool for web layouts, working directly on the DOM and stylesheet, preferring the flow for positioning and leveraging (normalized) HTML/CSS defaults.

My thinking is mostly born out of frustration with the performance of flexbox-inside-flexbox layouts and the total disparity of text layout between web and existing design tools.

The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...):

> In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web.

It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.

I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of other things

Yea I'm not trying to take away from any of that, nor provide generalized advice. Only addressing the crowd of people who will shy away from pursuing (or poo poo others) when their idea isn't some sort of original innovation that nobody's ever thought of before.

Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like, say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team. For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.

It could be anything, but it's always something, and no advice should be generalized.

If they were planning to IPO, they will have put in place a strategy to maximise the numbers for the year prior.

So the numbers for the year before IPO may have no relation to future.