Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny • Hacker News Board

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#291

Post by benreesman » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #283

pests wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make. Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe…

> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually. The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its e…

It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#292

Post by scarface_74 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

dabedee wrote: post #260

benreesman wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and…

I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the mos…

So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#293

Post by scarface_74 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #244

api wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acquisitions broadly. The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s…

Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though. It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplificat…

It just happened with Windsurf and Google.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#294

Post by benreesman » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #285

benreesman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that markets organize somehow. Even black markets in prison have rules (and for all I know, sensible ones under the circumstances). The drug trade has rules and norms. Cartels form and collude, the JP Morgans or Goulds of the world see excessive competition next to their neat steel or railroad trusts and decide to organize it. And sometimes this can even be an improvement (those old telephone poles with like…

That may all be true but I don't see how it relates. Adobe can't prevent figma from going public if it refuses their offer. It's an open market. Nothing stops new competitors from joining. Only regulators have absolute power in this regard. I'd prefer decentralized power

Preferring decentralized power is like preferring decreasing entropy, who wouldn't want that but it's almost never going to happen, and even local, temporary instances of such are miracles of nature meriting arbitrary study.

It's concerning that you don't see this, but makes no difference to how the world works.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#295

Post by jbothma » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #292

dabedee wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the mos…

So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

Any evidence of that?

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#296

Post by phillipcarter » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #272

benreesman wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and…

Having criticized a lot of her tenure (and still do!), Lina's problem was never whether she was right or not. It's that she was incredibly ineffective. Of course she was right. That's what made her practical ineffectiveness so problematic. She was often 100% right on what should be done but could only achieve 0-10% of it. I'd rather have someone who is 70% right on what should be done, but can achieve almost all of i…

Why do you think she was ineffective?

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#297

Post by scarface_74 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:08 PM UTC

stephen_cagle wrote: post #246

I wonder if a simpler solution to all this regulartion would be something like imposing a tax (fee?) when larger companies acquire smaller companies? So something like, "For every order of magnitude difference between the acquirer and the aquiree, there will be a 100% tax on the acquisition price paid to the US Federal government." So this would basically encourage companies to either have their own IPO (no fee at al…

Then the companies will just poach all the good employees they want and “license” the IP if they care about it from the shell of the former company. We see that now.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#298

Post by JustExAWS » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #209

markdown wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everything needs to be Not everything, sure. But this one more than most, needs to be democratic. If you don't see the wealth inequality today in which the 1% own 50% of the worlds wealth, and you don't see where this is inevitably going to lead, then I don't know what to say. Stay woke at r/latestagecapitalism

I'm pretty critical of how late capitalism is shaping up (I pretty routinely get called a leftist radical here on Hacker News which is increasingly Thiel-Aligned Psycho News). With that said, lots of options exist for a company like Figma doing a public listing: when you're the belle of the ball you can list how you want. Google did a pretty unconventional Dutch Auction thing IIRC. In this instance the Figma folks de…

And when Google did it, it was considered a disaster

Because when Google did it, it was a disaster?

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/18/pisani-googles-ipo-was-a-dis...

And “rent seeking” isn’t “The company is selling a product or service they make in a manner I don’t agree with”

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#299

Post by narcraft » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

There is another side to this coin: Figma's gain here is Adboe's loss. It doesn't make sense to use market-caps of specific companies as yardsticks of consumer welfare, which is the ultimate measure which antitrust actions seek to maximize.

The tradeoffs of allowing or preventing the merger are more abstract and counterfactual. We cannot know for sure what the world in which Adobe successfully acquired Figma would look like. Its natural to imagine concerns of Adobe simply killing, enshittifying or failing to improve the product - all things that still may happen under Figma's new corporate structure. Also consider the potential integrations with and improvements to Photoshop that have been missed.

That all being said I think Figma is an excellent product for the price and I have no fondness towards Adobe (though I've never really been a customer) and I'm glad that Figma exits as its own delightful product.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#300

Post by benreesman » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 6:14 PM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #292

dabedee wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the mos…

So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs.

This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!