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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#751

Post by occamsrazorwit »

sackfield wrote: post #734
sowbug wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with selling goods and services for more than they cost?

The employees are sold shares in the business that they expect to accrue a certain amount of value and with scale get very serious multiples in a liquidity event. With that promise broken the value proposition they originally signed up for no longer holds, some perhaps wasted the best years of their lives here when other options were on the table. If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they co…

> If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they cost, then open up a bakery.

What's the endgame to ever-increasing share value exactly? It's easy to say that a company should never stop growing, but there's no way that's a realistic ideal.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#752

Post by petercooper »

arrosenberg wrote: post #642
petercooper wrote: post #190

If countries want to heavily regulate business deals, I think the quid pro quo should be a tax system that provides a good way for founders and early employees to take some money off the table without having to sell to big companies like Adobe, by going public, or having half of any gain wiped out in taxes. Why shouldn't those folks able to pick up a lump sum for their work and the risk they took? They may as well ha…

Go public? Why shouldn't you have to pay taxes on it? Are you going to stop using the roads when you are rich?

Not no taxes, just something that maintains a good reward/risk balance and an invcentive for people to be founders or early employees of these types of companies. The UK used to have so-called Entrepreneur's Relief, for example. Some countries have low capital gains tax regimes. It's not an uncommon thing.

(Sure, a country could gleefully milk everyone to the max, but then they can't complain when they lack for entrepreneurship.)

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#753

Post by philosopher1234 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #631
endtime wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the purpose of building a business is just the exit The majority of those affected negatively by this are not the founders, but the employees. Many of them may have turned down FAANG positions that come with predictable liquid RSUs. Some may have kids (in fact, I know someone at Figma who had a kid in the past year). Liquidity's not necessarily about opportunistically passing on risk...sometimes it's just abou…

I don't disagree with what you're saying, at all, but the implication is still basically "And employees want someone else to be a bag holder, too!" And having been in that position several times, I definitely don't blame them! Employees also have the much tougher constraints that they can't diversify their employment like VCs can diversify their investments. But still, it's the same dynamic that people want to get ri…

Employees have much higher risk profiles, even if they hold no shares at all, than”bag holders” because they tend to have 100% of their families financial well being invested in a single company. Virtually no investors have even close to such a big bag holders

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#754

Post by chipgap98 »

sackfield wrote: post #734
sowbug wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with selling goods and services for more than they cost?

The employees are sold shares in the business that they expect to accrue a certain amount of value and with scale get very serious multiples in a liquidity event. With that promise broken the value proposition they originally signed up for no longer holds, some perhaps wasted the best years of their lives here when other options were on the table. If all you want to do is sell goods and services for more than they co…

There are other ways to give employees liquidity without being acquired or going public

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#755

Post by jbl0ndie »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #676
aliston wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

I believe that's what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshittification'. I don't blame UX designers and Figma for it though, and I think this comes from the corporate stakeholders rather than the PMs. Full disclosure, I'm a PM similarly annoyed by the enshittification of once excellent apps. Maybe too many large companies are stuck releasing features on a regular cadence without many interesting user problems to solve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#%3A%7E%3Atext...

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#756

Post by captnFwiffo »

fairity wrote: post #392

> Fifteen months into the regulatory review process, Figma and Adobe no longer see a path toward regulatory approval How in the world did it take fifteen months for regulators to reject this? That’s an absurdly long time to be operating a business in limbo, and I have to assume it’s the regulators dragging their feet since the companies have every incentive to move quickly. I don’t have an opinion on whether or not t…

[dead]

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#757

Post by olau »

aliston wrote: post #666
doctorpangloss wrote: post #643

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…

If you read The Design of Design Fred Brooks talks about the perils of trying to have multiple people design something.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#758

Post by [deleted] »

amrocha wrote: post #729
endtime wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the purpose of building a business is just the exit The majority of those affected negatively by this are not the founders, but the employees. Many of them may have turned down FAANG positions that come with predictable liquid RSUs. Some may have kids (in fact, I know someone at Figma who had a kid in the past year). Liquidity's not necessarily about opportunistically passing on risk...sometimes it's just abou…

What does it matter if Figma employees have kids? Having kids is one of the most common human experiences.

[deleted]

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#759

Post by codeptualize »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #659
codeptualize wrote: post #126

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'?

I didn't realize they had a breakup fee. That's is kinda nice.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#760

Post by solatic »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #497
sowbug wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with selling goods and services for more than they cost?

I think this is my favorite comment of the year. We've all become so inured to the idea, especially in startup land, that the purpose of building a business is just the exit (and hopefully we can get out soon enough with someone else "holding the bag"). As you point out, if Figma can build a growing, profitable business, there is no reason they can't IPO at some point. But still, this shows how even the purpose of an…

> the original intention was to get access to public market funds to grow a business. Now it's usually just a method of "exit" to let retail investors take the lion's share of the risk

Founders and employees would be totally OK with staying private, if the board would ever permit issuing a dividend. That's the "normal" way to have an "exit" (i.e. return profits to shareholders) without a public offering. The purpose of delaying issuing a dividend is to reinvest profits / additional fundraising for growth, but that growth should still result in a dividend in the future, just a larger one if the investment in growth succeeds.

Instead, founders and employees are encouraged to look forward to an IPO precisely because somehow we've come to believe that it's sinful for a company to issue a dividend, as if doing so means giving up on the idea that further growth is possible, when really it's only an acknowledgement of the fact that (a) there's a healthy rate of growth, (b) that healthy rate of growth costs $X, (c) if the company has $Y cash >> $X growth cost, then the healthy thing to do is to issue a dividend (so that shareholders can invest the excess into companies that are currently better recipients), rather than attempting to force growth faster than the company can support.

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