Figma

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• neutral assessment Evan Owen

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've, I've seen similar things, you know, companies like Figma, companies like linear, that's kind of blowing up right now. Those are very mature spaces with really good products in them. And so the, the bar for what you need in order to attract users is, is pretty high. So yeah, I think it's a growing sentiment amongst founders that just over time, even in general, across the, the, the software industry, user expectations are just continually rising.

• mixed fact_claim Unattributed

  So it's not like Figma and Adobe are not going to have endless, endless amounts of competition, but this is great for the market. Klarna on hold Figma going for it.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  And there's going to obviously be Canva on one side, on the prosumer side, you got Figma on this side, and then you have the new entrant, which is AI. And there are going to be 10 AI companies that really, you know, are AI first attacking Figma lovable.

• neutral criticism Unattributed

  So what would be very nice here is if while we were talking, Figma was listening. So we didn't have to type in the prompts, it would just be kind of another participant in the meeting.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if you had an event planner, what you just did, I would say is the first half of what an event planner would do. Yeah. A full 50% of what an event planner would do is they would say, here are the things you need to address.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  What it's doing right now, I believe is it's indexed the world's information like Google did. It's taken some web crawler, some people out there wrote, um, how to throw a conference medium posts, or, or answers, or Reddit threads, or where we've even published spreadsheets or something. So it's basically stealing content, liberating content, and then claiming it as its own and posting it up here for us to work with.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  So this is really good work.

• bullish assessment Sunny Madra

  it's really incredible. They can do this for any type of, you know, workflow or brainstorming or product review or anything you need.

• bullish assessment Brian Singerman

  Like Dylan, right? Like for Figma. Okay. They blocked the acquisition. Dylan's still going to have an amazing company. He's still building said company. He's not going to sit there and going like, oh, wine wine. This didn't happen. No. It's like, okay, that's the, that's the current situation. We're building this company to be bigger and better than ever. Right. So huge respect to somebody like that.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  That's companies like Rippling and Figma and others who've announced these sort of up rounds relative to what they've done before.

• bullish assessment Alex Wilhelm

  Figma was a hot company. Adobe won today because, well, it's crushing the game. And I would say eroding a good chunk of Adobe's market share today and also long-term cash flows.

• bullish assessment Alex Wilhelm

  I think it's overall a pretty strong number to start. I think Adobe was overpaying for the company to take it off the table.

• mixed fact_claim Lon Harris

  Figma, of course, design unicorn, it's the vibe coding, it's the web design, it's that incredibly hot sector of startups that we talk about, I feel like just about every day. So Figma's in that range, they price to an initial IPO range of about $25 to $28 per share. Rencap calculates that at the midpoint of that range, their fully diluted market cap, somewhere in the $15.9 billion range. Now, that is less than Adobe wanted to buy the company for just a few years ago. So it's sort of a mixed sign

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if you were an early stage investor in figma that probably returned your fund because it did so well you know good stuff

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  i ran it at today's market cap this morning so 48.8 billion not the peak that it reached on friday just trying to be fair here and that was irr with the additional time of 106 percent

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  in irr terms investors didn't do better if they bought it at the series c and sold at the ipo than they would have at the figma sorry at the adobe price but their total return was larger because it eventually uh became worth more money

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  i went back in time to the earliest time we could find figma's valuation which was its series uh it's only raised 40 million dollars at a 440 post pretty sure that was the series c so irr to september 2022 at the 20 billion dollar exit price would have been 187

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  a month now 20 million a month something like that so the the multiple will come down but it's in that it's in the line of overpaying on a multiple and it being worth it as we just broke down all right

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  so now that would be 400x last year's revenue but you would look at the run rate so what happened last month they gotta have twice as much

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  there's 6,300 people who we could probably just turn this on for and wow revenue comes pouring in so yes that does happen

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  index ventures led the seed at a 14.8 million dollar valuation uh so this is a 1351 x from the seed the total capital invested capital in the seed round was 3.8 million dollars

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  so you know how microsoft word single player you you edit the document you send everybody the document you get four copies of the document back you're like oh my god four different sets of edits yeah in figma it's live you're on the web you get a link you hit play and on your phone in the browser it looks like like the app so you can actually build an entire app in figma that's a click of what's called a clickable mock-up so then the ceo the sales team everybody can play with it and then you hol

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  figma is it's the software for creating mock-ups for ux and ui uh envision would be a contemporary so if you're designing something as a team your designers will make it in figma you can click on it so when i get a new version of inside when they do the job board at inside inside.com jobs they would send it to me in figma and we'd have conversations on it so it's collaboration around the production of web-based products iphone apps etc

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  now here now this would have come out of a 250 million dollar fund so the first 250 million would go to return the principal invested you'd have 750 million in gains from that fund just off this one investment let's assume all the other investments in the fund went to zero just a little back of the envelope math here 20 percent of 750 million 150 million for the partners five partners in the firm three partners well five partners in the front of that size uh five partners divided by 150 million

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  just keep in mind if those returns did not take their pro rata in other words they didn't keep investing and they did five rounds after that they did a b c d and e i think each of those rounds would dilute 10 you compound the 10 or even 20 you might have 50 of that so would net out to maybe a 200x return that means if you did put five million dollars in there you returned 200 times five million a billion dollars on a five million dollar investment it's a living it's a living

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the markup from its series a pitchbook pegs the post money valuation of the figma series a at 48.3 million dollars and a pretty juicy series a at that and this makes for a 413x return at 20 million dollars

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  we go into the detail of how does adobe justify paying probably three or four hundred times revenue for this company

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  this is like startup fairy tale right now we just get to play the full prince charming startup dream from start to finish we're gonna go from we're gonna do the seed investor multiples all the way to the acquisition uh it's delightful

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  it will happen for the figma investors as well

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  i remember when we looked at figma figma yeah it all started with credit cards people buying it but now you saw people saying i want 5 000 licenses can you set a sales rep over holy cow we didn't have a salesman it was plg you know uh we better hire some enterprise sales reps and so yeah you've got to be careful in the enterprise of the low end selling to other tech companies or people trying things for the heck of it and you've got to look for those leading indicators you know a few companies s

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  so i think that's a pretty sound progression

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  so as we talked about they're at around 400 450 million of arr right now and then the left axis uh is expected value basically this was their uh valuation and it's it's in purple and it obviously goes up to the 20 billion or 22 billion that adobe just paid you can see e was the last round they did in 2021 where they were valued at 10 billion before that they were valued at 2 billion in 2020 and then you know the series c i think they were valued at like 440 million or something like that and the

• bearish prediction David Sacks

  they promise the founder that you'll be left alone that usually lasts two years that coincidentally that's usually the length of the the earn out or the the golden handcuffs

• bearish prediction David Friedberg

  that die is sort of cast i think we're just debating the timeline in which it happens

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  i don't think that figma should do that here now that i've had a chance to think about it the reason is this that you have to think of pricing as not an element by itself but as sort of the most important element of a go-to-market strategy and there's no way that you can basically reprice figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go-to-market organization

• bullish prediction David Sacks

  i think this thing is going to close i think it closes

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  i don't see how these things aren't competitors with each other to some degree

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  if you look at all of the stories around figma one of the most powerful things they did was basically allow people to use this for free effectively forever yeah bottom-up sass yeah and the problem with adobe is like that's a business model disruption that they could not afford in the public markets because if you condition a set of institutional investors to be expecting seven to eight billion dollars of annual free cash flow and all of a sudden you're willing to torch it to take a quarter of th

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  he basically the profile basically said that he was spending months and months going from office to office all around the world meeting customers sitting with customers reading trouble tickets that's what he would do you know reading help desk tickets about the product on vacation whenever you see a a ceo that is so customer obsessed typically there's good outcomes

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  huge kudos to the ceo and the team and the investors what an enormous win for all those folks that's awesome it keeps silicon valley kind of going right and that's just awesome to see these kind of big wins

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  adobe's paying 50 times current arr

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  the numbers i don't see a huge slowdown here um i mean look once the numbers get into the hundreds of millions it's really hard to maintain the same growth rate you're compounding off such a large base that it's just inevitable you can't keep growing 3x year over year once you're at 200 million of arr but the fact they got first from 23 to 77 and then 77 to 210 and now 210 they're at let's say they're at 400 now and they're going to be at 450 by the end of the year plus it's um it's pretty amazi

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  so my point is i've seen a lot of sas metrics and i can tell you this ar ramp is phenomenal you know i'm sure people have kind of heard about the triple triple double double that's kind of what vcs want you to do they want you to triple two years in a row then they want you to double two years in a row and so forth this company did way better than that i mean 700k to 4 million is a really fast ramp and then 4 million to 23 million is incredible that's like you know over a 5x and then they did ov

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  i think that's that's basically an overreaction i you know i know all the news is basically on how adobe is paying 50 times and that's no longer the multiple the multiple is more like you know eight nine ten times for high growth sas companies there is truth to that but but i think it misses some important details about how fast figma is growing

• bearish assessment David Friedberg

  And I would imagine if I'm Adobe, and I'm looking at this Figma deal, do I keep fighting it? Or at this point, paying a billion dollars is probably net accretive to them, I think the stock price went up when they called the deal off. Which highlights that it was probably a better investment for them to say I'm going to pay a billion dollars to actually get out of this deal at this point.

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  I'm sure Adobe is not happy about the fact they got to pay a billion dollar breakup fee, which, by the way, was a really smart thing for Figma to negotiate.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  limited partners who were expecting huge paydays from Figma being sold, uh, to Adobe are now back to a waiting game of figuring out if this company can go public, et cetera.

• bullish endorsement Lon

  And I think that's, that's what's sort of interesting about this is you would normally think of these kinds of SaaS companies as well, they're it's adversarial. They want you to have more team members using more of their product for more time so that you're spending that much more on the product every month. And you can't extract your business sort of out of it. But I think, yeah, this is sort of like, well, what if we sort of played on a more of an even playing ground so that everybody felt goo

• neutral fact_claim Dylan Field

  we've gone through like the SOC 2 process now, which is, it's basically a process to make sure that you're able to be as secure as possible, even though you're hosted in the cloud.

• bullish fact_claim Dylan Field

  Your organization are able to adopt it and they're able to spread it without having to be to like necessarily get a lot of buy-in from others around them. ... we also see a lot of people spread Figma when they change jobs. They'll bring it with them.

• bullish fact_claim Lon Harris

  and yet figma, you know, still very much a player in this world. Absolutely. I mean, they went public recently.

• bullish assessment Dylan Field

  I've never been more confident in the role of design and the impact design can have. I wish designers felt the same confidence. This is the moment to be more bold, to take more creative risks, to double down on the power of design.

VentureSignalScore 22.5/100 for figma, composed from 2 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.85 for 50% signal coverage