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Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

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Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#911

Post by arrosenberg »

petercooper wrote: post #752
arrosenberg wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entre…

It just makes no sense and has never been necessary to incentivize Americans to take business risk. I don't understand why the entrepreneur, who is presumably getting a big exit in this scenario, deserves additional tax relief on top of that windfall. That sounds like another way for the rich to get even richer.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#912

Post by invig »

vlovich123 wrote: post #813
gkoberger wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be negotiated as an investment, but that only benefits Adobe. Figma wouldn't want it (would you want your biggest competitor to be an investor? they'd have information and leverage you wouldn't want them to have), and it defeats the purpose of a break-up fee (Figma negotiated for it because they didn't want to spend a year of their lives focusing on something that would benefit their competitor if it's all f…

Being an investor doesn’t necessarily entitle you to information/leverage. For example, Apple earlier had plenty of board members from competitors & they would excuse themselves from certain discussions. Similarly, an investment doesn’t guarantee you a board seat. So there’s all sorts of ways to structure things and it’s all a negotiation (e.g. the break up fee could have been a 2B investment instead or something). A…

As a conflicted board member you would have access to the information, you just wouldn't participate in the conversation / decision making.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#914

Post by exodust »

PeterCorless wrote: post #900
puppymaster wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. Figma's 'workflow' has become an api in itself. In order to compete everyone has to match the flow

+1 this. Website design has become an increasingly iterative, collaborative process inside companies. You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team. People need to annotate comments, and constant iteration is the name of the game. Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat. There's also a lot of work needed up-front on responsive design (as opposed to it being an also-ran or afterthought), and…

> Design, solicit feedback, integrate, iterate, repeat.

Except people in a typical company who might provide quality feedback on the new website, do not want to "browse Figma". They want an actual website to view - dev site or the actual new live site.

> "You can't just launch a new website and surprise your team."

Yes you can. Nothing beats launching a new site to motivate quality feedback. If you expect feedback to arrive soon after launch, you can use this to your advantage.

If you like the sound of crickets, share a link to Figma and ask people for feedback. Designers and developers will respond, others like sales and non-technical staff often won't. Why? Because people prefer the security of their web browser's familiar reference point when assessing a website. As opposed to browsing an app that gives them a special window to a slippery canvas where an impression of the website is found.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#915

Post by wildpeaks »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #643
RickS wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

> (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…

You might be confusing it with something else: Figma is merely for prototyping and designing, it's not the application that is shipped to end users (so it's like blaming the bugs of an app on its photoshop mockup).

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#916

Post by fauigerzigerk »

ThomPete wrote: post #816
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't have to buy it. That's the reality. [...] You guys are simply factually wrong. It's the argument and the conclusion that I don't buy, not your (and Adobe's) carefully selected set of facts. Here's a very big player in the graphics software market that tried to buy a potential strategic threat out of the market. This is the fact that matters in my view. I wouldn't let the top 5 in any market buy another com…

Again that's not how antitrust regulation works. I am not sure why you keep repeating the same mistake. Figma have 3 million users. In what world would a purchase of them be dominating Canva with 135 million monthly users and with 16 million paying subscribers. You are confusing Adobe being a big company with why they are a big company.

>Again that's not how antitrust regulation works.

Apparently anti-trust regulators disagree. They put up enough of a fight to at least give Adobe an excuse for letting the deal fall through.

>You are confusing Adobe being a big company with why they are a big company.

I have heard your argument and I understand what you are saying. Unfortunately, you're not responding to my counter arguments, which makes this not a very interesting debate.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#917

Post by gherkinnn »

endtime wrote: post #578
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#918

Post by meowtimemania »

Solvency wrote: post #616
lvl102 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. Microsoft would actually make the product a lot better and add useful AI elements to it. I just don’t trust Adobe.

What other beloved product has MS acquired and made a lot better?

Microsoft seems to be pretty hands off when it comes to acquisitions. Github/LinkedIn were both a acquired and each have grown a lot since the acquisition.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#919

Post by tanepiper »

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…

Google Maps is the worst for this - the only application that has nearly killed me several times.

Re: Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger

#920

Post by kuldeepfouzdar »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #892
015a wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Figma's ARR in 2022 was around $400M. That $1B cash infusion could be invested in treasuries with an ARR of ~$50M; this isn't just a liquidity infusion of a billion dollars, it increases their net income by like 10%, basically free of charge.

You're confusing revenue with net income. Plus, if the best that Figma can do with a billion dollars is just invest it in Treasuries (and I'm not saying that's the case), then they should just give it to their shareholders and see if they can get a better return. I only point this out because many people are often confused by the effects of higher interest rates, e.g. "Why did this company lay off all these people wh…

Point is adding $1B on the balance sheet is definitely a plus. How figma uses it is up to them. But yes, companies don't use all the cash right away and do put some of it into short term investments.
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