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Figma files for proposed IPO

figma.com

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Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#41

Post by atombender »

colesantiago wrote: post #13

So now that Figma will be owned by Wall Street, it will only get considerably worse from here. It is now time consider and find and fund open source alternatives. I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?

At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features are just as good, and sometimes better. They have a decent desktop Electron app that wraps it, too.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#42

Post by YZF »

snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #21
btown wrote: post #10

They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage…

> The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity. And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks great in figma but not in a real webpage

Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack and designers need to worry less about things they can't control and think more about usability and simplicity.

I work on a large web based application, with designers, who use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma. Something about the balance between the software stack(s), the domain, the focus of designers today, the front end engineering, and product management is broken. It's interesting that Figma did (IMO) a great job at addressing the stack so they can build a product that does what they want it and then is used by so many to build products that don't always do what their customers want. Asking Figma to use the wrong stack for their product (which is what I'm reading between the lines) is not really the right answer...

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#43

Post by snickerdoodle12 »

YZF wrote: post #42
snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity. And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks great in figma but not in a real webpage

Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack and designers need to worry less about things they can't control and think more about usability and simplicity. I work on a large web based application, with designers, who use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma. Something about the balance between the software stack(s), the domain, the focus of…

> Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack

I'll call Google and I'm sure they'll get right on aligning their browser's rendering engine with figma's

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#45

Post by lvl155 »

Figma is an incredible product but I don’t like what they’re doing with AI. They should focus on enabling UI/UX designers to do more instead of making a glorified Dreamweaver.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#46

Post by YZF »

snickerdoodle12 wrote: post #43
YZF wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack and designers need to worry less about things they can't control and think more about usability and simplicity. I work on a large web based application, with designers, who use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma. Something about the balance between the software stack(s), the domain, the focus of…

> Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack I'll call Google and I'm sure they'll get right on aligning their browser's rendering engine with figma's

Is this alignment the issue with your application? Are there design alternatives that would be impacted less by some rendering engine differences?

What about other browsers? Versions? Platforms? OS? Resolution/screen size? My huge frontend team can't handle this, even before we used Figma.

Isn't the problem trying to get this "web platform" do something it was never meant to do? How would this be solved by Figma using a rendering engine that would grind their product to a halt?

I'm old enough to have done a lot of native platform UI work, the web stack in many ways was a step backwards. It has obviously a lot of advantages (run anywhere) but in some ways it's more like IBM terminals on a mainframe vs. a native UI where you have full control. I (obviously) use and make web apps all the time, but they often suck, and this isn't Figma's fault.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#48

Post by overfeed »

colesantiago wrote: post #15
btown wrote: post #10

They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage…

Don't forget the incredible lock in Figma has in the design space. Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly. Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied.

> Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly

Aren't designers mad at Adobe for doing exactly this?

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#49

Post by [deleted] »

granzymes wrote: post #33
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened in 2024 that caused their operating expenses to increase so much?

Mostly a 356% increase in R&D: FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage | 2023 | 2024 | YoY ---------------------------|------|------|------ research and development | $165 | $751 | 356% sales and marketing | $201 | $472 | 134% general and administrative | $168 | $316 | 88% And most of that increase came from a one-time charge from allowing employees to sell their RSUs. While not a cash cost for Figma, it…

[deleted]

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#50

Post by greatgib »

To me, an IPO by them at this moment let me think that they know that they are on top of the wave and that it is better to cash-in before growth starts to stale.

They got a huge influx of users when image editing AI started to be a thing, I'm not quite sure that they haven't already conquered most of new users that could join them.

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