Figma filed for their IPO (and revealed EVERYTHING)

LTM is not lifetime revenue. It stands for last twelve months revenue. Massive difference there....

That take on the failed Adobe acquisition has to be the most late stage capitalism take I've seen in years... Wtf do you mean "no design tool can be acquired"? Of course they can just not by the only party in the market that has a (failed) competitor, which is also known for its monoplisitc strategies. That shit is the exact reason behind why we even have regulation in the first place...

19:00 what a dumb take. The fact that there are two major design companies (Adobe and Figma) means more design software acquisitions can happen compared if there was only one. Another design software getting “too big” for acquisition means three major companies and so on. Competition is important. The crocodile tears for Figma devs is absurd. They’re all doing just fine. The ipo will make them all extremely rich.

Honestly this is just another developer who doesn’t understand design and relegates it to “pretty UI” - I’m sure many companies will generate designs using AI but when all apps look the same because all these apps use the same UI kits people are going to need figma to go back to the drawing board. You also heavily underestimate the need to visualize the way we use UI and software in general which is what generated the demand for figma to begin with. Figma is not a necessity for most designers but it sure does make design and communication a lot better.

(19:20 ish) As an economist—specifically a competition economist—your take on the Figma + Adobe merger is one of the most misguided I’ve heard in a long time. No, this doesn’t mean that no design software can ever be acquired. It simply means that Adobe would have an even easier way to dominate the market if they acquired Figma. Other firms around the world could still acquire similar companies—you could buy them, for all it matters. Claiming otherwise is both obviously wrong and misleading. Furthermore, if you believe a merger would suddenly make Adobe’s products better, you’re missing the point entirely. Adobe wants to acquire Figma because it lets them make more money—without needing to improve their products. As you yourself acknowledge, they’ve already realized they don’t need to offer high-quality tools to stay profitable. Why would Adobe aquire Figma if it makes them less money??

The fact that they are used in over 90% of Fortune 500 companies means they are winning. The adobe acquisition being blocked is their prize for winning.

A few people that bought a house with money they haven't earned yet or some cannot retire yet (probably still super rich) vs. the fundamental of how our economy works: competition. Theo: these poor few people

That sucks you can't see someone building a company as something they care about and only as a vehicle to generate wealth. The silicon valley mindset is so toxic, telling the first company you could think of to be acquired by was Raytheon. I enjoy your content and you're very insightful about this world, I just hope you can view it through a better lens.

Just the fact that Figma was valued at $20b, and Cursor now, allegedly, somewhere near $10b is amusing. Considering that (revenue aside) one is full-blown software, and the other one is VS Code fork built on top of LLM's they do not own.

The problem isn’t anti-trust, which IMO worked perfectly here. The problem is the wild regulatory burden of going and being a public company. That’s what needs fixing. The compliance costs of Sarbox alone is tremendous across all industries, manifesting in ways difficult to measure because it leads to fundamentally different (and not better) practices all the way down to entry level employees in some cases. It warps incentives in ways that I think people of all political stripes don’t like. It’d be a bigger political topic except lawyers, accountants and auditors get rich off the status quo and they’re not afraid to flex politically.