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Figma files for proposed IPO

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Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#51

Post by jonas21 »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #30
granzymes wrote: post #27

Headline financials: FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage | 2023 | 2024 | YoY ---------------|--------|--------|------- revenue | $505 | $749 | 48% gross profit | $460 | $661 | 44% op ex | $534 | $1,539 | 118% net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)% free cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)%

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

In May 2024, they removed some of the vesting conditions on RSUs so employees could sell shares in a secondary offering.

From an accounting perspective, it was an $800 million stock-based compensation expense, though it didn't really cost Figma anything.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#53

Post by diegof79 »

system2 wrote: post #11

When they go IPO, will you guys buy it immediately, expecting it to go up? Curious what people think about the figma's future.

Point of view as a Figma user...

With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period.

Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall). What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team.

The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight integration with Figma could help them leverage their current subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers. Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting market.

The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing, which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited.

The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools, they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma. Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#55

Post by tshaddox »

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

In my experience that's rarely due to low-level rendering differences, and almost always due to the Figma design not accommodating real-world data.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#58

Post by esskay »

overfeed wrote: post #48
colesantiago wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yup, Figma is likely to become the next Adobe. Shareholders are vastly more important than consumers as we all sadly know.

Re: Figma files for proposed IPO

#60

Post by hiphipjorge »

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…

As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day.

One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.

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