Adobe has agreed to acquire Figma.
Adobe has agreed to acquire Figma.
Probably one of the bigger acquisitions for this decade, and an interesting one since Figma had been a direct competitor to Adobes tools.
Some exciting news from the #startup world. Everyone's favourite design tool Figma got bought by potentially one of the more hated companies out there, Adobe - for 20 BILLON USD! :O
Just to get a sense of how much MORE that is to similar startups in that ecosystem:
So that is crazy money - why would Adobe pay this much for Figma? Simply because Figma was taking over the design world which Adobe had monopolised for decades with the likes of Photoshop, Lightroom and more.
Im a personal user of all these tools, and 10 years ago they had the best product market fit out there. Their tools were the best and easiest to use, and because of this they were the most popular. However over the last decade their tools feel more rugged, less collaborative and require more compute resources to run. And just like that looks like Figma, took off and became a big threat to Adobe.
Lesson learnt - marketing can only go so far to get your users. If you stop focusing on the product market fit long enough, users will stop coming since they will have found something better. Not to say Adobe was not innovating, but I believe they stop listening to their users some time ago (which is why they have a general negative perception around them).
A lovely quote I read on an HN discussion:
I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them. [1]
Finally - the most exciting thing as usual, it’s the money itself.
So thats 40X up if you joined up front, and 10x up from Series D. Thats some gains! But also to keep in mind 9 out of 10 startups fail, and probably a few in 100s give this much gains.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32850178