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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#671
post #549

[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies] I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX. But since then: * Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new a…

> I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. I think they probably are. I follow Adobe closely and when the acquisition was announced I was pretty skeptical it would be net good for Adobe in the long-run. The problem wasn't the idea of buying Figma, it was the very rich price being paid. Adobe has a history of not doing a lot of big acquisitions (for it's size and massive cash position). When it does acquire big…

One thing we could all agree is 20B for Figma is too expensive considering how the market has shifted.

Figma is still solid company/business, but Adobe probably could acquire them much cheaper in today's market.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#672

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?

They just got a billion dollars as a breakup fee. A billion dollars could be: $500M to early investors, $250M to the people that built the company, $400k each for anyone employed before the merger announcement, $100k each for anyone hired since, $50M under a pillow for safekeeping. And that's without needing to give up ownership. Is that not a good 'exit'?

Is there any reason why you think that the billion dollars will "trickle down" to the people who would have enjoyed the benefits of the merger?

Sure, your hypothetical payout sounds good, especially assuming they don't have to give up anything, but it's still hypothetical and I doubt that anything close to what you described is going to happen with that billion dollars.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#673
post #622
post #549

[Pure speculation; I don't work in the UI space at all, and at neither of these companies] I wonder if Adobe is secretly happy about this. They were acquiring Figma at the peak of the market (for growth stock/startup valuations) because of the existential risks that Figma was threatening, due to their collaborative development UX. But since then: * Startup valuations have fallen. Ignoring regulatory concerns, a new a…

(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…

As a graphics designer of almost 20 years i have to heavily agree. Firefly is nice for drafting and dabbling with stuff that once would've been served by stock sites, but aside picking a few demo images or making some abstract pattern backgrounds here and there, this has close to zero overlap with the UI/UX into development & design system management process Figma serves. It's almost like saying the Bing bot eats away at Laravels user base.

As a personal aside: I'd like to commend the initial push you guys did with XD. While Figma was still out of my scope back then, and XD played a major role for me in transitioning away from oldschool Photoshop or Indesign mockup processes into a modern workflow that integrates with my dev team and focuses on component & design token centric thinking.

Figma may have left XD thoroughly in the dust by now, and i honestly couldn't be happier that the merger won't happen, seeing how Adobe has been committed to absolutely dismantling the UX of Photoshop to the point of it only remaining installed on my workstation because Affinity Designer still lacks some core feature parity - but in its earlier days XD has been absolutely crucial to the development and modernization of my whole thinking and workflows!

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#674
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm. This seems like a huge overreaction. Do you think the founder of Figma -- which is still worth $B's, making him obscenely wealthy 'on paper' (but 'on paper' in a way that most wealth is counted) -- plus, he likely sold enough via secondaries during the later rounds to be set for life -- is bemoaning his career path? Furthermore, there's something like 20k M&A deals / yr completed in North America alone, the maj…

What I find most sad about entrepreneurship is that almost all the successful founders appear to have been 'chosen' by a famous VC or investor. It's almost like what you do doesn't really matter. I've seen some 'chosen entrepreneurs' keep failing and they keep getting second, third, fourth chances and eventually succeed. Being chosen seems to be the most important element for success. But how to become chosen? It see…

Hey friend - you're wrong on this, although I understand how it might be comforting to think this is all some vast elite conspiracy.

The reality is that you "become chosen" by building a company that is growing very quickly in a big market. That's it.

Most successful startups didn't wait around for some name-brand VC to pick them (that's the most anti-entrepreneur mindset I can think of). The big funding happens much later than the initial traction and momentum.

Yes, you have to be personable enough to be able to talk to clients, investors, recruit top talent, etc -- but that's not the VC arbitrarily choosing whether they like you or not -- that's a cold reality of being a great founder.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#675

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.

Because literally 90% of developers today are wholly incapable of producing the cutting edge performance Figma requires. It's an engineering marvel. It's like wondering why more people can't just compete in F1. Money and talent at the rarest levels. Most companies engineer at the performance level of Atlassian. Which is not remotely sufficient.

where can i read more about the engineering behind Figma? Is it not just a UI for rendering polygons? Is all the technology in getting high performant rendering on top of a javascript engine? If so that doesn't seem like anything that crazy.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

What's so bad about the Spotify app? For the most part, it looks like a bunch of lists (not so much spreadsheets) to me... As someone that is only tangentially in the design space, why do you think collaborative design works so poorly? I have noticed that, in engineering reviews, complex backend designs get scrutiny, but rarely "I feel..", "I prefer..." types of comments, whereas frontend teams get all types of those…

This is a stylized comment.

It is a bunch of lists, but the UI is sometimes the lists are scrolling horizontally album covers, sometimes they are popping up from menu buttons, sometimes they go full screen and scroll normally, sometimes they are cut short to 5 elements and you cannot see more, sometimes they continue to 20 elements and you can press to see more, sometimes it's a list with headers that all contain more than a presentable number of elements and you have to tap the header to see more, sometimes it's a mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, sometimes it's squares and sometimes it's rectangles, sometimes your whole list is shrunk because of a popup up top that is going through a list of items they want to notify you about but the popups are shown one session at a time, sometimes they have a full screen popup that is going through that list of items, sometimes you are driving your car or trying to find a song for a baby or trying to do your run and you are being shown many different kinds of lists when a simple, scrolling up and down list with a search box would be preferred, but instead there is so much stuff they want to show you in these lists in so many different shapes that you didn't ask for.

Do you know what the provenance of this morass is, at Spotify? There are many, many Figmas, each a UX designer hoping to reinvent the list in their own way, various product managers competing for attention from the user to introduce a Feature and Increase Engagement for their Key Performance Indicators. The user is better served without any of this stuff.

Man, have you seen the Google Maps and Gmail apps? Google doesn't use Figma either, but the ethos isn't unique to Spotify, it is absolutely toxic. The amount of crap I can accidentally tap on while driving using Google Maps, telling me information I absolutely do not care about, trying to get me to Do Something for Some Product Manager's Product: it's negative ROI.

> why do you think collaborative design works so poorly?

To me, using Figma is a symptom of the incompetent people outnumbering the opinionated and competent. It's not so much that collaborative design works poorly, I'm sure it works very well in Apple's design org. But that's not what the Figma product is. It's a holistic social experience of giving 10x as many people the ability to inscribe their opinions and get credit for participating in a project, as corporate people do, which is very valuable to 10 subscribers as opposed to the 1 person actually doing the work. It's a great business!

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#677
post #651
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1st hand info / network. I'm a CEO. YC Founder and Techstars founder. My CFO is a fractional CFO that works with other startups clients, same stories. This kind of information and what really goes on behind the scenes is rarely revealed. Mainly because if I told you about the shitstorm story of a top tier VC trying to buy my company and the deal exploding, that VC will do everything in their power to bury the story a…

Thanks. I've sold two companies, and gotten a pressurized squeeze from a major player (which we said no to - we were profitable so didn't have runway problems), but I've never heard of dropping an offer valuation at the last minute. Nasty business!

I can give you one worse: a board member (and deal lead, from Ventures) telling me there are only 3 people on the board.

3 months later a month before the deal is supposed to close, 2 more board members come out of the woodwork and shut the deal down. No idea they were on the board. Was outright lied to. (I have the call recordings to back that up)

Mind you these are top tier brand-name VCs. They hide behind their reputation, and it works because people like me are extremely hesitant to write comments like this calling out specific firms and people.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the $1 billion termination fee Adobe now owes them.

Figma's employees are probably devastated and demotivated. Their exit dollar signs just went poof. And they've probably been working on Adobe's roadmap / integration for the past 15 months. I'm not so sure Figma is in a better spot, even with this new cash in hand.

> and they've probably been working on Adobe's roadmap / integration for the past 15 months.

$1B would be enough to cover that completely, but as a person who has been in companies that have been acquired. (multiple times), that's not really how it works.

I've never worked anywhere that started working on integrating or unifying roadmaps before the contracts were inked and the deal fully ratified.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just got a billion dollars as a breakup fee. A billion dollars could be: $500M to early investors, $250M to the people that built the company, $400k each for anyone employed before the merger announcement, $100k each for anyone hired since, $50M under a pillow for safekeeping. And that's without needing to give up ownership. Is that not a good 'exit'?

Is there any reason why you think that the billion dollars will "trickle down" to the people who would have enjoyed the benefits of the merger? Sure, your hypothetical payout sounds good, especially assuming they don't have to give up anything, but it's still hypothetical and I doubt that anything close to what you described is going to happen with that billion dollars.

I don't think it will.

But the comment was "just imagine founders, investors and employees, thinking they had a really good exit".

If the company cared about "a really good exit" for everyone, it can make that happen with a billion dollars of nearly-free money. If the company doesn't want to make that happen, then why should we expect the merger would have made people any happier? What makes this demotivating?

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#680
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was only one company to which Figma was worth $20 billion and that was Adobe, because it was a long term threat. I just hope Google or Msft doesn't get any funny idea to buy Figma.

I could definitely see MSFT making an attempt, to bring Figma + VSCode closer together.

Microsoft acquisition makes sense. GitHub is basically Figma for developers, and they are one of the most solid AI players out there.
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