Good job, Figma
Note from April, 2024:
Have a read at my snarky commentary from the days of the Adobe + Figma acquisition announcement. Notice I predicted the discontinuation of Adobe XD almost 2 years ahead of its occurence.
There has been a ton of talk about what this acquisition means for our beloved Figma.
Some are all depressed and host moments of silence during meetings, as if it was all decided that Adobe is going to ruin the product, or else, kill it. (all the while, just like in Musk’s Twitter case, the deal will go through in 2023 at the earliest)
A self-fulfilling prophecy
My boy Warren Buffett likes to say that forecasts don’t tell you much about the future but do say a lot about the forecaster. Wouldn’t bet against old money Buffett.
Here’s a major observation and a jump to the conclusion: designers, assuming they’re on average high on openness and neuroticism personality traits (creativity and empathy are correlated with these traits) might tend to fall prey to the self-fulfilling prophecy, that:
Of course, Adobe would buy Figma and make it Adobe which obviously means bad for some reason, although their software is the industry standard in virtually all other areas of creative production;
of course, the evil capitalists will ruin our beloved indie communal design tool, 10x the price and remove the free tier and make you install Creative Cloud and your MacBook will blow up;
of course, everything will go to shit and then they’ll buy Sketch and we will go back to sketching buttons on paper and xerox mockups in cubicles like in the dark ages!!!
Ahh, the dark ages…
Definitely go ahead and enjoy a moment of silence. The practice of stillness, or equanimity, is a powerful force, discovered and practiced by the Stoics, Buddhists, and Christians. Wouldn’t bet against ancient wisdom.
But being worried about someone, that someone being the no. 1 design software maker in the world, has been around for ages, 25k headcount, valued at $130B, ruining a product and company they’re buying for $20B exactly because it’s great, is the least bit wise.
I’d like to address some of the concerns I’ve come across:
If anything gets killed, it’s XD
Building a company is tough. Building a giant is even more difficult. Adobe didn't get there by making customers use inferior software out of spite.
We’re definitely not going to be pressured into using XD— I read somewhere2 that although 7 years in the making, the tool brings only a $15M ARR with a few people working on it compared $400M ARR and 800 people at Figma.
But again, this is a forecast, and I could be wrong. It does say more about me than about the future 😉.
So you know, just chill.
What are we getting out of this?
Well, could be a lot of things. Image editing, 3D, motion, and typography, are all domains of Adobe. There is just a whole bunch of capabilities that Figma can tap into being a part of Adobe, and that makes it quite exciting.
P.S. Start with typography. Please. Thanks.
Adobe has ruined everything they bought
Among the depressed, I’ve seen a bunch of resentful comments saying that Adobe, like all evil corporations that only want to ruin stuff, has ruined all products they bought.
That didn’t seem right, as Scott Belsky, the CPO of Adobe, was the founder of Behance, bought by Adobe in 2012.
So I read his announcement of the deal:
You can scream bias, yet the fact is, at this point, all forecasts are just that. Biased.
Things will change, but I’m willing to bet that Figma will get better, not worse with this acquisition.
Closing
Although this is a great deal for Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma, (who is by the way an investor in our favorite collaborative data notebook Deepnote), especially in this market climate, I do think the super optimist plans were to compete with Adobe and stay indie, as far as indie goes when you’re penetrated by Sand Hill Road investors like nobody’s business.
Most of humanity can’t grasp the challenges of growing a company from 10 to 100, not even to 1000 or 10 000. Adobe is a giant of 25 000 people. That fight would be brutal. And as they said, Figma is a mission-driven company, and if they can stay on track towards that mission, power to them.
And Dylan, I’m looking forward to what you build next. We need innovation and industry now more than ever.