They will go public and can unload then. It’s an opportunity for figma to offer their customers early access to shares before IPO. Many of us will support them.
Yeah, I do feel a little bad for the employees with equity but honestly I'm really glad Adobe isn't allowed to buy it. I hope they find a much better company to sell to if that's what they want to do.
“On December 17, 2023, the Company and Figma mutually agreed to terminate the Merger Agreement and entered into a mutual termination agreement effective as of such date (the “Termination Agreement”). The mutual termination of the Merger Agreement was approved by the Company’s and Figma’s respective Boards of Directors. In accordance with the terms of the Termination Agreement, the Company will make a cash payment to Figma in the previously agreed amount of one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) (the “Termination Fee”) within three business days following the date thereof. The Termination Fee is the sole and exclusive remedy under the Merger Agreement, and the Company and Figma have each waived any and all other claims in connection with the Merger Agreement and the transactions contemplated thereby.”
> the Company will make a cash payment to Figma in the previously agreed amount of one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) (the “Termination Fee”) within three business days following the date thereof
Three business days to wire $1b, the week before Christmas. That has to be a fun phone call with the bank.
> in the USA, the backoffice won't approve it without one-on-one interaction
For a business like Adobe, yes. They’ll probably want a verification call. Plenty of funds, however, handle similarly-sized transactions with completely electronic verifications.
You’d have to be a _very_ large payroll to have leverage over adp.
For many payroll operations between big employers and payroll processors it’s an inner bank ledger transfer as the big payroll processors have good reason to maintain accounts at many banks.
Vice versa is also true. If you have a very large payroll your treasury team is not put out by having accounts at lots of banks.
Sending a billion dollars is not the same thing as having a billion liquid dollars in one place to send. It is the difference between Accounts Payable and the Finance department of a company
I appreciate the insight from someone who has expertise in this area, but I think it's worth thinking about whether there are more constructive ways of phrasing this. Almost nobody who reads your comment will ever be in a position to "wire up to 999 million" at any point in their life, easily with just a mobile device or otherwise.
Here is how it is going to go, Adobe will tell their accountant to wire the money, the accountant will get the details from Figma. Adobe accountant will call their bank or maybe even go in to the branch. And tell them they are sending X to X. It will take a few stamps and confirmation and it will be done in about 5 mins. Some computer somewhere will go - 1 billion Adobe and + 1 billion Figma.
On the bank side nothing really happens unless Figma decides it wants to withdrawal all 1 billion. Then X bank will owe Y bank money, that loan will be balanced at some point. It will probably take a few days so Figma will be told it needs a few days.
Even if Figma decides to pay all their employees a share, that's also just - 50k Figma, + 50k Bob Smith in a computer somewhere.
There is no actual exchange of money until stuff is balanced at some point or you withdrawal. It's all just 1s and 0s in a record.
The problem here is not doing the transfer, but holding 1 cool B in cash being ready to transfer. Even if it is in liquid assets, 3 days to liquidate 1B is quite short.
If the value of Figma has fallen by more than $1B since they signed the deal (which I think it probably has) then passing up $1B to get out of the deal is not nuts, especially considering the regulatory opposition. Though it depends more on whether the value of Figma to Adobe and less the agreed acquisition cost has fallen below -$1B, since Adobe was presumably agreeing on a deal that they thought gave them significant surplus.
It’s a common term in these sorts of acquisition attempts now. AT&T paid T-mobile $3 billion.
A failed acquisition attempt can be very damaging to the company being acquired. You can lose employees who don’t want to work at the new entity that never happened. It can change your product roadmap (are you really going to invest in directions the acquirer won’t want after completion?) and make your executive team start job hunting. Etc.
So it’s not unreasonable or uncommon for the acquirer to agree to such a provision. And the board was presumably highly involved in a large offer like that.
1 billi and they didn’t even have to give up any equity. I’m not a fan of the regulators screwing this deal the way they have (primarily due to the precedent they’re setting), but in the grand scheme of things, methinks this is actually a great outcome for Figma. 15 months of hassle with $1B cash at the end, to be delivered within 3 business days.
It probably is in a bond or treasury note. The "within 3 days" probably covers the selling of the bond/treasury, waiting for the funds to clear, and then sending it over to Figma's account.
Nothing that is public that I've seen says this is true. You can get a bridge loan for $1b backed by whatever iliquid assets you have from any major bank, and then it's up to you how quickly you want to unwind other things. The loan might even be interest free if the bank wants to keep Adobe's business for other M&A activities.
I used the term bridge loan as a sort of umbrella term that might be technically not the best as my training isn't in finance and I know some of this stuff from exposure by proximity. What I'm referring to sometimes is also called a revolving line of credit, the most famous case was Enron's revolvers for example. The point is big banks will normally allow companies to take out large short term loans for this type of thing, usually having large amounts pre-approved.
I'm sure a company as big as Adobe has multiple billions in capacity on revolving lines of credit at attractive rates from a syndicate of top banks. They do have cash and short term investments of close to $8b to borrow against!
It’s total madness, isn’t it. Long time user, from 1-5, then everything fell apart with CC, subscriptions and the clusterfuck of shite installed on my Mac.
> then everything fell apart with CC, subscriptions and the clusterfuck of shite installed on my Mac
except it also made Adobe more valuable than it ever was before and pretty much jump-started the ARR / SaaS valuation model that defines Tech today, so it's not ever going away
I'm in the same boat. A very long time user and I really liked everything about it. When they started pulling that subscription shit with tons of crapware I had enough. Cancelling subscription (even a short one) was also a terrible (I would even call it criminal) experience. Tried couple of alternatives, and frankly I don't like them. They are either slow, got abandoned in a year or have unintuitive workflows.
I would even pay $500 for a LR Classic without all of their other crapware, but they just like that too much to take my money.
Pixelmator/Photomator is an interesting alternative with robust software for both Mac and iPad. I’m a bit too fond of Photoshop layers right now, but I’m tempted to switch.
Confronted with the same sort of problem, I ended up with Capture One and couldn't be happier. There are other options out there, which you should definitely explore.
I bought the Affinity Suite during Black Friday, just to have some decent software on mac to do some editing. I'm far from a professional though and I have no idea how good their software actually is.
I found a loophole - check my older comments - to let me get out of their system, but they may have closed it. I bought Affinity for a laugh but switched to Capture One for better skin tones, Photo Mechanic Plus for better management. Both those have gone to the terrible subscription model but I’m just going to freeze my Mac‘s OS where it is and have a reliable machine for this.
Same, I miss the ownership of my photos and photographic workflows from the older lightroom days. It's sad that the industry rolled over to accept this and it trickled to the consumers.
This part is so true. Adobe under-the-hood SWE feels so shoddy. It feels as if their products, although delivering the good, is strung up by different patchworks. And it spawns files & folders all over your system
I tried the subscription for Lightroom CC and left my computer on at night to sync my meager 50-100GB to their cloud clusterfuck. Trial period ended after 2 weeks and the sync hadn’t finished – and no it wasn’t an issue with my bandwidth.
Excellent news. I think there should be more products, more companies, and more competition. Adobe just buying up it's competition will only ever directly hurt consumers.
Except outlawing acquisitions by larger tech companies will absolutely reduce funding and incentives to start companies, and result in less products, less companies, and less competition.
> A bureaucrat will decide if you can exit the way you want to.
It's not up to the bureaucrat but to the courts. The FTC doesn't "approve" or "reject" deals--it can just take legal action to try to stop a deal, but that still gets adjudicated either in a federal court or in an FTC administrative law court to a judge which is appointed independently.
Adding a legal battle with the FTC to the cost of any acquisition can chill and kill otherwise obvious deals, and or sap value out of those that push through.
FWIW, I think there are good reasons to limit tech consolidation, including this one. But anyone should realize that it will reshape the industry in unpredictable ways, including some that harm "real" consumers and builders.
But anti-trust isn't being invented now. It's always existed. Companies already factor in anti-trust risk when doing M&A—it's just hard to quantify the expected value of that risk
If anything, IMHO, we've been too lenient with anti-trust in Tech in particular over the past 5-10 years. This just dials things back a little, and makes it so that "hard to quantify" risk is a little more likely than it was before, and certainly a little more likely than zero
I don't think Adobe / Figma specifically is an "otherwise obvious deal" precisely because it has such obvious anti-trust risk. The fact that this merger was even announced is all the proof I need that we were being too lenient. Figma can still sell to any number of huge Tech companies
What’s net new about this? It has been the case for decades that if you try to sell to the only major competitor that it could be blocked under antitrust.
A bureaucrat also decides the amount of lead you can put in your product and sell.
In fact, there are all kinds of things you can't arbitrarily do because it hurts consumers, both physically and financially. This includes strengthening industry monopolies which has time and time again demonstrated that it causes incredible harm to entire segments of society.
> This includes strengthening industry monopolies which has time and time again demonstrated that it causes incredible harm to entire segments of society
I don't think you can take a hypothetical worst case and make it apply here. You could also say that we shouldn't have governments, because look at WW2 and all the war they declared.
Adobe buying Figma wouldn't cause incredible harm to entire segments of society. It's barely even a monopoly, in that Adobe doesn't really do what Figma does already, and there is incredible potential in just making another Figma competitor if Adobe ruins Figma.
This isn't that though. This is a company with a clear monopoly trying to hoover up smaller competition to reduce competition. We shouldn't incentivise this behaviour, on either end.
If this is the liquidity event that Figma were betting on from day 1 that's their mistake for not foreseeing regulators being unhappy about it.
I'm fine with some other company buying-up Figma, just not Adobe. Microsoft could buy them (and hopefully not repeat what happened to Expression Blend) - or maybe Alludo could resurrect the Corel brand and launch Figma under that title?
The reality is that for extremely high-growth companies such as Figma, only companies with an extremely strong existing business and strategic fit can afford to acquire them. Corel, for example, was valued at $1bn in their 2019 acquisition. There's absolutely no way they could acquire Figma. At the same time, VCs are betting on Figma-like outsized exits for their model work.
I get people are dying to stick it to the big tech cos, but the reality is that the long-term effect of actions like this is reduced funding and less new, disruptive companies – and strengthening the situation for the cash-rich behemoths like Microsoft, Google, etc.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they that there is no way for them to make a product that will steal Figma's market for less than $20 billion.
Adobe's despised reputation in business practices makes it hard for users to choose Adobe when any other creative option when it is available.
That would certainly be good for Adobe's users, but it means they'll have to put in a lot of work, which costs money that could otherwise buy so many yachts.
Clearly Figma is providing a valuable product to the market. In part visible here by how people celebrate this decision. But people are celebrating Figma's continued independence without understanding that without the possibility of being acquired for a large amount of money, the funding and incentive situation that resulted in the beloved independent Figma wouldn't exist.
This is not as much about Figma, which is big already and will be fine, but the 100 other potential Figmas that might not even been started yet. They will have more difficulty finding funding, attracting employees with equity, etc., when the scenario 'big tech co acquires company for lots of $' doesn't exist anymore.
Why would anyone go worth at a small company for equity if there's no chance to get liquidity? Why would investors invest? This decision might improve the short-term situation of the market, but over the long-term, I can only see how it benefits the big companies, which rely on today's cashflows / RSUs to attract people.
> Are you saying that the business of "we make a thing and we ask for money from our users for said thing" model cannot work?
I'm saying that companies like Figma, which has raised $333 million dollars in venture capital, at up to a $10bn valuation, cannot exist if those investors don't see sufficient options for liquidity.
And given that people strongly value companies like Figma, as evident in this very thread, that would be a bad outcome all in all. The only market participants for whom this wouldn't be a bad outcomes would be big, established businesses that have to fear less startup competition.
"I value Figma the product, I couldn't care less about how much money they raised" is an argument like "My power comes out the socket, so I couldn't care less about building power plants". It's hard to have one without the other. Figma the product was built with the the money they raised.
I think the "disruption" narrative has played itself out by now. Nothing has been disrupted. Society still largely functions the same way as it did 20 years ago, and the same firms are mostly still running the same businesses.
We were promised a radical new world, what we got was a couple of apps for fast food delivery from McDonald's.
Hmm... I struggle with your post. What about AMD vs Intel? Or TSMC / Samsung vs Intel? Intel is far weaker that it was 20 years ago, and chips are cheaper (inflation adjusted) and WAY faster 20 years later. Is that not a win? I feel like desktop computing is basically flying cars at this point. For 1500 USD, you can get 5GHz CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB NVMe drive, reasonable GPU that is utterly light speed compared to 20 years ago. The first time I ever used an NVMe drive, I literally thought the Linux commands were not running correct because they finished so quickly!
Last one: I promise that I am not trolling here: What about psuedo-self-driving that Tesla and a few others have in cars now? On an expressway, it is pretty amazing -- hands off the wheel, talk with your friends with no worries of distraction.
I think the person you’re replying to was referring to the post-smartphone startup era. All those hardware companies you mentioned are older than dirt. None of them qualify as “disruptive, VC-backed startups” like Figma, Uber, or Airbnb.
I'm fine with some other company that has a track record of doing bad things to the things they've purchased, which is no different than the company I'm against buying this company.
How are you okay with MSFT? The logic is not very sound
I guess the parent's point was that it's better for Figma to be acquired by a company that clearly has a Figma-shaped hole in their lineup, rather than someone with a lot of existing overlap that will likely just strangle it quietly in the night.
TBF, they kept Skype, GitHub, and Minecraft, running fairly well - one can disagree on the features, but they did get continuous development and support, they weren't just "deprecated" and sunset like, say, Yahoo would do.
I think this is net-negative for consumers, in a pretty significant way. If the most incentivised lifecycle is to seek VC investment to make a non-susitainable product in the hope of being acquired and swallowed into The Borg and shut down, we still end up with less good products.
- Product life-cycles become short, consumers are weary of anything new. How many times have you seen product launches here on HN where the top comments are worrying about sustainability? That either there will be a rug-pull for consumers in the future, or they just plan to be acquired and shut down.
- Larger companies continue to have no incentive to actually improve their product and compete with others if they just purchase everything in the market.
> If the most incentivised lifecycle is to seek VC investment to make a non-susitainable product in the hope of being acquired and swallowed into The Borg and shut down, we still end up with less good products.
"Aim for the moon so if you miss you still end up amongst the stars."
The actual _goal_ is to be an independent successful company, but getting bought is the back up option that provides a safety net. If it was success-or-bust (no "-or-get-bought") the risk calculus would not make it worth it. It would make the American economy much more conservative and much more like Europe.
But when the most common business plan is "1. Spend VC millions, 2. Acquire non-paying customers, 3. ???, 4. Profit!" it kinda seems like the un-written step 3 is "get acquired by a MAGMA company". You just say something like "oh, we'll get revenue by adding advertising / premium accounts later" as a fig-leaf for the public.
If your only goal in founding a company is to get acquired, you haven't made a company; you've made a product, and probably not a profitable one.
We should be encouraging way more medium-sized companies, that operate sustainable business models, make money for their founders and employees, and aren't subsidized by cheap money. I think if startups actually had to sustain themselves we'd see a lot less grift and waste in VC.
I don’t disagree with the notion that there should be more medium sized, self sustaining (“lifestyle?”) companies, but such statements are rarely if ever followed up with _why_ this is a desirable outcome for everyone involved.
I guess it comes back to how you view the current system. If you find the idea of unicorns and acquisitions and the further centralization of capital distasteful, it's kind of self-evident why you'd want to see something that represents a break from that norm.
For me, yes, I see the obvious argument that more money leads to more (and faster) innovation. But it can also result in an economy that is too tightly coupled and dependent on the might of a few massive companies, whereas an economy that is distributed across more smaller businesses is more robust.
At the extreme, you might imagine South Korea: a country that is highly consolidated into one or two major cities and propped up by massive, economy-shaping corporations. I don't think anyone would disagree that Korea made massive economic strides in a short period of time, but I think there's much more debate about the long-term health of the Korean economy and people now that their continued prosperity is so centralized.
And, of course, there's the consumer angle; though I can't claim any scientific methodology, my impression of the sentiments surrounding this merger are that it was pretty popular with Figma's investors and employees (understandably so, as they stood to gain from the merger), but was deeply unpopular with their customers. You could make the argument that "a Figma owned by Adobe is better than no Figma at all," but consumers have seen it all before at this point: a good product is acquired, and then either a) the pricing model changes, b) the rate of innovation slows down, c) the product is ultimately abandoned somewhere down the line, etc, etc. None of these outcomes are essential truths, but they are common outcomes of companies getting larger and larger to the point where a business unit that is otherwise healthy is deprioritized because it is not profitable enough or growing fast enough for the larger parent to care; or, conversely, the smaller parts suffer because the larger parent encounters trouble and can no longer sustain their acquisitions, even if they are keeping the bloat afloat.
I think it's fine if no one starts vampiric companies that dump free services on the public destroying the perceived value of software for the purpose of a fast unicorn exit. Of course, these companies always look to advertising for funding so they are obtrusive.
Unless you are thinking of real companies that would be affected by this ban? Retail stores don't care about this ban. Companies that sell real products wouldn't care. If they sell real software services and plan to turn a positive profit rather than exit this wouldn't impact anyone other than unicorn chasers, which are bad for everyone.
But Figma isn’t a vampiric company dumping free services for the purpose of a fast exit. It’s been around for over a decade and charges _more_ for its principal product than Adobe charges for comparable products.
So by your own definition, real companies are affected by this!
The company will probably do well for the reasons you mentioned, only some late shareholders are affected. A good exit for the economy would be actually an IPO.
I don’t see the relevance of that question: outcomes for companies fall onto positivity/negativity ranges beyond merely a bankrupt / not bankrupt bjnary.
Acquisitions also reduce competition. If competition only exists to be acquired you are only funding an ever-growing oligopoly, the more acquisitions into the oligopoly the more power they have, diminishing the number of available markets to compete in (since one of the oligopolistic companies will certainly have more capital than a newcomer).
Anti-trust is not a new thing, it's even considered a foundational aspect of competitive capitalism by some thinkers...
I think it's the opposite. Because many companies start with the dream of an exit with a high price tag, and what they end up developing is a missing feature from a bigger software suite, which is already enshittified by a big software house to the core.
Instead, smaller companies can start and slowly get bigger while getting bigger. Affinity suite is a great example. While their photo tool is not my cup of tea, designer is great, IMHO.
Let's say you're pitching your startup to a potential investor. Would you pitch it as "the next Adobe" or "something Adobe might want to buy"? Which one would you be more likely to invest in?
Yeah, I get it, some founders start their startup motivated by a potential MA. And this is great for them.
However, as a customer, I absolutely hate this. Instead of finding a way to actually make the product/service self-sustainable, they just increase the number of (usually) free users. But once they sell, normally the new owner either shuts the service down or turns it into crap.
Agreed. I think if you’re passionate about an idea then you should be able to channel that energy into making it a sustainable business. If you can’t motivate yourself to do that… maybe let someone else who is motivated do it.
It’s a personality thing. The type of person who starts companies tends to start a lot of them. The idea of sticking around at a company and keeping a steady hand on the tiller (after all the big product problems have been solved) is anathema to these folks. What they need is a succession plan.
It just happened that mergers and acquisitions turned out to be the cleanest, easiest way for founders to hand over the reins. In days past, companies would go through this transition process internally, often by succession through the founder’s family. The founder may have been a very entrepreneurial type, but the child who was raised to be the successor was more of a managerial type. When it worked out, anyway. Sometimes none of the founder’s kids were suitable. Or the founder tapped the wrong kid to take over.
Tech acquisitions haven't been outlawed. And this particular situation is applicable to perhaps 2 or 3 a year (all of which are multi-billion dollar values).
I doubt very much if this will stop funding of new companies except perhaps at the level of Uber/WeWork.
I agree to be honest, I do find it refreshing too that they're both Willing to part ways instead of trying to manipulate the system. I don't think this could just customers but even the companies themselves I don't see a loss.
This genuinely made me laugh thank you. But no, they're not refreshingly "willing to part ways", just that their extensive legal teams assessed every possible angle to force this through and the big chairs made a call that proceeding in the face of such harsh opposition was going to be too costly.
They themselves said they spent 15 months trying to manipulate the system and are only doing this because they failed, let's not be naive about them doing this out of the goodness of their hearts lol
Adobes cancellation practices are literally illegal in the Netherlands by the way. The deceptive trick of "pay monthly for a full year" and then hitting you with the cancellation fee is against local law. (It's called de wet van Dam for the curious.)
You have to threaten their customer support with legal complaints to make them comply with it, it's super frustrating to deal with. They do fold immediately when you do this though, so they know it's illegal but hope the frustration of getting through customer support will deter people (and avoids the legal problems).
And yes I know you can just switch subscriptions and use the early cancellation period there to avoid the hit back fee from cancelling. It's the principle that's scummy.
If you're in the US, then I can recommend privacy.com
My current bank (Wise) also offers virtual debit cards. I am in the UK now and Wise works well. I still use both since I still have my American bank account though.
Being on the receiving side of that can be very frustrating. Even though users can cancel easily and without any human interaction, they cancel their credit card which then costs us multiple months of revenue in cancellation fees.
Which is why I'd not do it to a small company with a clean cancellation process and also why it is a good thing to do it to Adobe (multiple times a day ideally).
In Europe just cancel your credit card authorization at the bank, or your SEPA mandate, or your PayPal authorization, depending on.
They will try to scare you and ultimately won't go after you because the legality of this for b2c is very very iffy (because of the way they present the information on the sale page, which doesn't meet any informed consent level required). At least in my country, apparently in NL too, and if it ever got to the European level it would be smashed easily.
Why do people keep recommending this? If you do this the next step they take is sending your debt to collections, and now you have either ruined credit or a court case.
>hitting you with the cancellation fee is against local law. (It's called de wet van Dam for the curious.)
I doubt this. The early termination fee is 50% what you were obligated to pay. If Adobe got rid of this than consumers would have to pay 100% of this. De wet van Dam is about the about not being able to cancel the subscription itself and not about being able to pay to get out of what you were suppsoed to pay for a subscription period.
Keep in mind there is a normal monthly subscription and when buying the product the three choices of monthly, annual billed monthly, and yearly billed up front are equally displayed.
If Adobe’s a buyer at $20b, they’re a buyer at $20b. I don’t see how selling stock to the public along the way increases fragmentation or prevents monopoly.
Once upon a time, digital product design happened in Photoshop and Illustrator. Then competitors like Sketch and Figma came out with a better product. This made Adobe create XD to compete, but it was unable to make a good product so instead they tried to purcahse their competition instead of making something better.
9 months after Adobe announced it was to purchase Figma (and 3 months before it hoped the deal would close), Adobe discontinued XD.
Fireworks wasn't an original Adobe product but a Macromedia one they got during the acquisition. Adobe seems to have had some massive lack of effort for those (Flash being the prime exemple).
>Fireworks tried to fill the gaps between PS and Illustrator, but never got traction.
I couldn't disagree more. Fireworks was a perfect blend of raster and vector editing and was killer for early 2000s web design work. It was an amazing Macromedia product that got neglected by Adobe.
If I'm in a cynical mood I sometimes think it's because an up-to-date Fireworks would have cannibalized the sales of PS/AI, but I think that gives too much credit to Adobe.
They will be forced to now, isn't it? I am sure they wouldn't want to start from scratch. But have to admit, XD was nothing as compared to Figma right now.
XD never took off. If Adobe wants to get into the UI market they would need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. If you're starting with a failed product you're most likely going to fail again.
They had a really good core in my opinion. The overall performance and especially the prototype preview was really nice. Every change was instant and not even heavy animations were a problem. Much nicer than the Sketch slideshow style prototypes and Figma prototypes that load very slow, not to mention the bugginess.
Judging by the 20bil price they wanted to pay, I guess they know what kind of investment would be needed to compete now.
CivitAI’s web tools are great for someone getting their feet wet but it presents an extremely stripped down options UI relative what’s available in Draw Things on iOS/macOS or SHARK on Windows.
True, but that's precisely my point: even with this stripped down version, I was able to hack together exactly what I wanted for an upcoming project in far less time. I got a model in the exact hairstyle, pose, and costume I wanted. The upscaler did a pretty good job of making it production ready.
This stuff is wildly productive for noobs who just want to get stuff out. Maybe its not something you'd see in an Apple ad, but its definitely something you'll see in a small business ad.
Then they will be outproduced. I, a graphic design noob, managed to create a bunch of social media posts for an upcoming project that included a completely custom 3D character in precisely the poses I wanted, all within an hour. Without gen AI, I would have likely spent hours digging through stock photos, modifying lighting and colors, and still not achieved what I wanted to.
Not using the latest and greatest tools in your profession isn't really a flex.
Maybe they are hampered by "doing the right thing" and only training on Adobe Stock content?
Firefly (Adobe's generative AI) works well if you're already stuck in a Photoshop-heavy workflow, for quick successive generations right in the canvas if you're editing or extending an existing image. Better than Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugins I've tried.
>Photoshop's generative AI is substantially worse than what I can get from models on Tensorart/CivitAI + an upscaler.
But with Photoshops, I can generate things to be seamlessly placed into my existing scene, with it understanding things like placing the wheels of the car it just inserted on the ground, with a shadow underneath and such, again seamlessly integrated with my existing image.
It's very much not just about generating an entirely new AI image.
Adobe's vision is fully supporting the content lifecycle, not only the creative aspect. In this sense, Figma made far more sense for Experience Cloud rather than what it gives to Creative Cloud.
Got bit by this. It felt absolutely horrible to not have any recourse. We had a yearly adobe sign contract, it was based on a particular usage estimate and quite high. Called in weeks before the renewal and they said we missed the window to cancel. There was no option out of it. No escalation. Had to stomach a massive bill for of a product we weren't going to use.
Is not paying an option? Ran into this issue with a large software provider once but they had some actual account management negligence / weren't responsive so we used that to hang our hat on not paying and eventually they let it go.
No, because contract law is built for centuries past and lets Adobe screw you for trying this. Not sure if they do, but they definitely could.
Back when communication latency was days or weeks, allowing sticky auto-renew that ignored payment failure and asked for a lot of heads up time on a cancellation made sense. It was exploitable, but it was worth it to buffer the latency. Now we don't have the latency, so it's just exploitable, the law hasn't caught up yet, and Adobe is happy to exercise this advantage against you.
I'm curious, what exactly are the ramifications of this "contract law" in the context of Adobe subscriptions? Adobe will sue you? Are they suing large amounts of customers?
The information you provide with payment - name and address - is sufficient to add a delinquent account to your credit report, which will immediately tank it. Again, SSN is not necessary for this.
The risk-reward here is out of balance for SMB, so while we could just not pay it was more headache not to. Here is hoping for some class action. Perhaps small claims but its pretty frustrating that a company as large as Adobe has this in place.
Gym memberships, cell phone plans, utility bills, unpaid parking tickets, etc. will all report to your credit report if you miss payments. Debt, not just credit cards. A delinquent account on your account will drop it by 100-150 points immediately.
Also that their cancellation window has limits on both sides - I told them more than six months I advance to cancel my renewal and the refused and toll me to call up again in a particular 30 day period close to the expiry date...
That's the worst part, the products are great. $20/month is reasonable for PS/LR considering that yearly releases were retailing for $500+ in the CS6 era. Cloud storage and generative AI credits are rolled into those costs. New features are showing up again. Regarding Photoshop, there are no real alternatives.
It's not that Adobe's depending on subscription engineering, it's creative pros 100% dependent on Adobe products being willing to put up with this shit because they have quality products with no alternatives.
Exactly. The downside of subscription software is that companies like Adobe become life insurance companies that produce software. Their enterprise value is defined by churn rates and there's a strong incentive to lock customers down to reduce that risk.
I work for a huge org, and we tell companies like this to go fuck off with terms like this. The real scam of Adobe is that there is no way to assess engagement rates with their tools. The only way to get this data is by metering PCs or datamining your IdP.
> Regarding Photoshop, there are no real alternatives.
Unfortunately, the same is true for Illustrator. There are competitors that have 95% of the features, but that remaining 5% is critical for serious professionals.
> it means the underlying product is not good enough to stand on it's own feet.
Adobe CC not strong enough? That's not it.
Subscription retention practices like this are to juice quarterly numbers to delight analysts on the earnings calls. If Adobe was a private company this level of lock-in desperation wouldn't be necessary. We'd still be able to buy the software once like we used to.
That's a hopeful statement. Maybe it wouldn't be necessary, but it would be implemented anyway. These days, any company not having subscriptions is seen as leaving money on the table and they will become targets for takeovers.
> These days, any company not having subscriptions is seen as leaving money on the table
This kind of product economics comes from Wall Street. It's led to a world where companies, rather than charging at a stable price point that allows them to keep the lights on, offer something at an unsustainable $10/mo to build marketshare. Then they raise the price every year after that, whether or not the additions made have any added value.
Your comment makes me think you have no experience with Adobe's product line if you think it can't stand on it's own feet. In fact, after Windows, I'd imagine Adobe software being one of the most pirated apps out there. Doubtful people would pirate software that's no good.
While your whimsical comment might apply to some rent seeking subscription products, as phrased, it does seem like you are totally out of line with it application in this thread.
Many states are cracking down on these practices and no longer consider “sorry you forgot to cancel” as a legal agreement binding you to a renewal. Common sense says you should have to consciously renew vs accidentally doing so via some bogus contract clause.
Of course if you’re relying on such gotchas to keep subscription numbers up you’ve already failed and are just on a slow march to irrelevance while leaving pain and destruction in your wake.
One of the key functions of procurement: Checking for automatic renewal clauses in contracts and removing them when found. This is a red flag in many companies.
I mean, sure, but what the FTC is doing is not a concern in the slightest compared to the issues at stake there. It's nice that the agency is doing something I like, though.
> Adobe says the FTC is looking into its subscription cancellation practices
Great news, where do I testify? Adobe tried to bribe me personally to not fight their subscription cancellation policies for the company I was representing. Given how obviously unimpressed I was with the whole thing and how I was clearly not the target market of a creative cloud subscription, I can only assume that this is a policy that the sales rep tried to push, rather than a one-off they thought might work.
Looking at your profile, it says you work for Google, so I assume this is in the context of google? You guys probably have the internal legal resources to advice you. If it was not in that context, ChatGPT at least suggest that this is first of all a federal fucking crime (Domestic Bribery Act seems to apply here) and you can contact the Department of Justice, the FBI or report it to the SEC which offers a whistleblower program.
Please consider your next steps carefully though and contact legal counsel basically immediately since you just publicly accused adobe representatives of a federal crime! Frankly, I would ask Dan to remove your comment ASAP.
Fun Fact: The SEC offers financial incentives to people who report those violations!
This sounds it might be like a hallucination. I've never heard of any "Domestic Bribery Act" and I'm unable to find one in cursory online searching. (In 18 USC there are prohibitions on bribing public officials, but that doesn't seem relevant here.)
But "Domestic Bribery Act" seems to be a hallucination. I have so far only encountered fake sources or links that don't exist, this kind of hallucination is new and unexpected.
Thanks for making me aware of this, quite scary how utterly convincing chatGPT was in this instance.
The SEC effectively has worldwide jurisdiction, for something that relates to a USA-listed company. The tip submission form seems relatively lightweight.
https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/submit-a-tip
ChatGPT is not a good place to get legal advice. Regardless, there are a variety of ways that you can get boned for accepting bribes in your capacity as an employee. In the US, the "honest services" laws have been weakened by Supreme Court action, but there are other paths to criminal prosecution.
The advice of "STFU and get the comment removed" is spot on.
This was several years ago in a different role before my current employer, and has nothing to do with my current employer. I agree that legal advice would have been good here, but to be honest I was just glad to cancel the subscriptions and move on with more important things. The company I worked for is sadly out of business now so wouldn't be a target of any action, and I stand by my comments in a personal capacity so have no wish to take them down currently, but thank you for the advice.
I wouldn't be (and am not) making this sort of accusation on behalf of any operating company without prior approval.
Unless you have clear proof of that (saved emails...) and own the company, or you were acting as third party (consultant,...) I would advise not making those accusation in a public place without consulting with their legal representative. It is simply not in your personal interest, and if someone starts an inquiry into this and said company doesn't want to help much you might find yourself in the middle of two legal giants in need of a scapegoat.
It’s great to see the FTC is looking into this. Every time I’ve had to deal with Adobe subscriptions it always feels like they put you through some maze which usually ends in being forced to pay a cancellation fee or losing in some other way. I recently lost 160 asset tokens I had saved up in Adobe Stock after canceling my subscription. I’m sure it mentions this in the fine print somewhere but the only reason I had saved that many tokens up was because I couldn’t cancel without paying the fee. So they trapped me, took my money and then took back the tokens I only paid for because they locked me in with a cancellation fee in the first place. At the very least I should be able to keep the asset tokens. The whole thing seemed absolutely ridiculous to me.
There is only a cancellation fee if you buy an annual subscription, paid monthly, and then you don't pay for the 12 months you committed to. For people who don't want to buy a year at a time there is a monthly plan that is more expensive since you are no longer buying in bulk.
I looked around, and I can't find any names to pin to the investigation. There's a very low-tech way to find public staff contact information, but you need a name. I don't even have a telephone number for what is probably the correct group (Division of Financial Practices), just their DC mailing address. Regardless, I can tell you that right now that Washington offices are empty. Skeleton crews only. Check back in after the first of the year.
It looks like regulators are actually doing their job. I would love to see more of this, along with breaking up companies that have gotten too big for their britches.
declining frequency of IPOs is mostly driven by regulatory requirements that keep getting harder over time; the 90s were before sarbanes-oxley. I don't see any reason to believe fewer acquisitions will cause more IPOs.
If you're licensing a patent to others with reasonable terms, it's not a patent troll.
I understand you think they provide a service since you seem to not understand what a patent troll is.
As a reminder, a patent troll company is a company "that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
They don't sell any services, don't do any (reasonable) licensing, nor provide any goods.
Patent trolling is not a company category, rather a behavior of a company. Furthermore patents themselves are goods that can be licensed, so my point stands.
Not to mention “trolling” is already passing judgement on the activity to begin with. The actual service is licensing. I’ll leave it to the courts to determine whether enforcement of patents qualifies as trolling or not.
Oh I'm sorry. I meant to say "Patent Trolling Companies", is it easier to understand now?
I'm sure you are aware that there actually is a category of companies that just participate in "patent trolling", and do nothing else. Not sure why you're being so pedantic about the grammar instead of trying to reply to the actual arguments...
Seems like if you've only come up with patent trolls, then "plenty of companies" doesn't apply. Patent trolls weaponise the legal system against other companies. They exist because the government can't make a good enough patent system.
They don't seem to be significant enough to the overall general statement that companies exist to serve their customers with goods and/or services.
Look at the corporate raiders of the 1980s. Firing people, loading up a company with debt. And taking them bankrupt makes a ton of money for private equity. No product required, immensely profitable!
> I'm not sure how valuable it is to argue with someone who cannot read two messages up in the message hierarchy...
Do you mean the one you mentioned 4 messages up? And dropped with this?
> Ok, lets hear you argue for what service a patent troll provides.
Sure - the one you dropped was domain flipping. Clearly buying something at a certain price and then selling it again is not nothing - that's why people pay for it. Just like house flipping. Or just buying anything speculatively. I assume you realised that, and dropped it for that reason.
Look at the corporate raiders of the 1980s. Firing people, loading up a company with debt. And taking them bankrupt makes a ton of money for private equity. No product required, immensely profitable!
Why do you say that, and how does it work? Are you making a completely different statement than the point the parent was making? Sure you usually need to sell something in order to get the profit, but that doesn’t mean that the good or service or it’s quality was prioritized above getting any profit, which is what I think parent was talking about.
Generally speaking, private non-subsidized companies that offer goods and services for sale cannot actually survive without any profit, right? They can bootstrap for a while with investment, but they tend to die, statistically speaking, if they prioritize goods and services over profit. The way companies tend to survive death is by doing everything they can to ensure that the sale of their goods or services generates a profit. You might also be temporarily forgetting that it’s also incredibly common for companies to pivot on what products they make and sell whenever they’re not making enough profit.
TBH it actually seems really funny to me argue about which comes first, because the kind of company we’re talking about needs both, it doesn’t otherwise exist. But the idea parent shared, that profit takes the highest priority, is often absolutely true in practice, many companies will do everything they can to avoid not making a profit, from lowering the quality of their goods and services, to coming up with other more profitable products, to merging with another company that has more customers for your product and/or a longer runway.
Depends on your worldview. Historically, companies had a purpose first and profit second. You needed approval by the crown before you were allowed to start a company. Then, once your company fit the purpose as seen by the crown, you were allowed to make profit with it.
That has changed, especially since the 80s, where the prevalent world view turned to "let's have the market figure out purpose", which equates to anything that is profitable is good.
We've since learned that this isn't automatically true (as exemplified in this abandoned merger, for example), and my understanding is that right now there's no clear opinion in society whether profit or purpose comes first in companies.
When there are elected officials who say that maybe capitalism is more important than democracy, it becomes clear that consensus is going to be difficult to achieve.
Yes. But when you're driven by the idea of exit striving towards such things becomes ultra focused. Put another way, exit is the ultimate recognition that these purpose(s) have been acheived.
> The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired.
The vast majority of companies are little "lifestyle" businesses without any intention of ever getting acquired by anyone. Your local pizza shop doesn't expect to be a unicorn.
And *this* is The Key difference between an entrepreneur and a mom & pop.
That said, even a mom & pop should be mindful of exit. What happens when the owner(s) wants to retire? Or has a serious health issue? Or has a family member with a health issue? Etc.?
You don't have to be a unicorn to build something that someone else wants to acquire.
Editorial: And this is why I dislike words like solopreneur, mompreneur, and so on. Sure you can have a one person business with a steady revenue stream. But that's not a 'preneur. If you are the business and the business is you, you're ability to exit is highly limited. That's not a 'preneur. If you get hit by a bus and your customers are screwed and the business tanks. That's not a 'preneur. You're much closer to a m&p TBH.
I realize that's counter to conventional wisdom on social media, but such snake oil ideas deserve to be called out already.
The point is, regardless of circumstances, if no one wants to acquire the business then the business by definition has not created value (in the eyes of the market).
Being a mom & pop is not the same as being an entrepreneur. They are two separate mindsets. One use exit as a North Star the other just retires and closes up shop.
I didn't say there was. I said it was about value, as in creating something someone else wishes to acquire.
There's nothing wrong with the mom & pop mindset. But it's not the same mindset as being an entrepreneur and focusing on value; with exit being a clear and ideal way to see the value.
Revenue actually is value (a subset of it) delivered to the business's customers. Enterprise value is a different thing. It's an important thing, but it's totally possible to have a business that delivers immense value to its customers and has very low enterprise value. We generally call these "not great businesses," but that doesn't make them not businesses.
Not really. You can for example generate $1,000,000 in revenue and not generate value. Perhaps you're not profitable, and therefore perhaps not attractive to being bought. That is, no value.
Value is what someone is willing to pay (for the company). It is set by the market. Revenue may or may not be used by the suitor to determine value, that is, how much they're willing to pay to acquire the generated value.
Revenue !== Value
To clarify, they are all business in the legal sense. But a "solopreneur" who gets hits by a bus, leaves customers high and dry, and can't exit (i.e., have someone else carry on) is not to compared to an entrepreneur who generates value such that an exit is possible, and customers are less likely to get screwed.
Yup. Something is only worth what someone else (i.e., The Market) is willing to pay for it. You can stack up a ton of customers and revenue but if no one else wants it...sorry...no value.
At the extreme, imagine all these social media "creators". In some cases, tons of revenue. But their revenue-producing-hobby is such that no one could take the torch and carry on. If that person is abducted by aliens, the company also disappears. No one else can buy it and carry on. That is, no value created.
I'll keep repeating this:
Revenue !== value
Entrepreneurs create value. Not revenue. Value.
The problem with this thread seems to be that people are confusing revenue with value. If it was about revenue, then the definition would say that. It specifically says value.
> Revenue actually is value (a subset of it) delivered to the business's customers. Enterprise value is a different thing. It's an important thing, but it's totally possible to have a business that delivers immense value to its customers and has very low enterprise value. We generally call these "not great businesses," but that doesn't make them not businesses.
Not really, revenue is not value. It's used as a proxy but it's not a true indicator of value. An extreme example, LOADS of revenue but also loads of expenses (i.e., not profitable). Is that "creating value"? I think not.
Or again, the "influencer" model. TONS of revenue but when was the last time you heard of such a person selling? They're not because there's no value. The influences walks away, the house of cards collapses. No one is going to pay for that. So, sorry, no value - regardless of revenue.
Therefore, if you ever want to know the value of your business as a reflection of the alleged value it creates, put it up for sale (or sell shares). You will quickly find out if you're actually creating value or not, or at least someone thinks you have the potential to create value. But that isn't revenue.
That's it. You want to measure value? Then be prepared to ask the market (i.e., exit) Anything else is a proxy, a deception, or something you tell yourself to make yourself feel good.
I'm pretty sure Sam Walton didn't establish Walmart with the hope of being acquired.
It's bizarre that we live in a time where we can't even fathom a business that is fundamentally very profitable, we just envision growing the company until it's attractive enough for someone else to take on the unsustainable cost of running the business: either get acquired by a large company or hoist your debt onto the public market.
Investment really did used to be about more than a complex "greater fool" game.
> But that's not a 'preneur. If you are the business and the business is you, you're ability to exit is highly limited. That's not a 'preneur. If you get hit by a bus and your customers are screwed and the business tanks. That's not a 'preneur.
Sorry, but it absolutely is. Entrepreneurship is just starting a business and taking on the majority of the risks and rewards. There is nothing in the definition that says you have to sell the business or exit in any way.
I'd argue that taking on VC money is actually less entrepreneurial than going it alone - you're offloading a big chunk of the risk to your investors.
"Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value"
Exactly!
But sure, I'll entertain you...
Person 1 is a so called solopreneur. Works hard. Pays bills. But eventually burns out and because no one want her/his "shares", she/he closes shop. "Damn I wish they told me about exit and the value there of...," she/he thinks. A hobby that produces revenue is not the same as producing value.
Person 2 is also solo. Does the same (i.e., works hard, etc). But she/he is constantly concerned about the shareholders. Sure, it just so happens those shareholders are her/him. Nonetheless, there are - in the mind of P2 - shareholders. Eventually, she/he sells the company to some other entity for a respectable amount of money (read: value purely defined).
Person 2 !== Person 1. No way. No how.
Again, I ask, what defines value better than, "We'll pay you for your company."? (Hint: Nuttin' does.)
Friend, the confusion is all yours. You can contort it all you want, but The Truth is:
"We want your company" === value.
p.s. A Google search? That's funny. SERPs? Talk about a lesson in lack of value.
> Person 1 is a so called solopreneur. Works hard. Pays bills. But eventually burns out and because no one want her/his "shares", she/he closes shop. "Damn I wish they told me about exit and the value there of...," she/he thinks. A hobby that produces revenue is not the same as producing value.
My old boss closed shop. Didn't want to fuss with selling to someone. He'd generated plenty of economic value to retire on and travel around the world for his retirement years. Nice big house, boat, no debt, lots in the bank. Profits for his clients, salaries for his workers, revenue to his selected vendors.
No acquisition. Plenty of economic value generated.
You can continue to be aggressively wrong and watch your comments descend into the grey and get flagged as a result, but I'm out. Constructive debate requires a shared reality and set of facts.
There's nothing wrong with being Person 1. But it's foolish, at best, to keep confusing Person 1 with Person 2. You're willing to commit to that insanity. I am not.
Aggressive? When did stating the obvious become aggressive?
No it isn’t just about selling out. It’s to unseat incumbents, deliver better products, make a difference. What do you think Google would have turned out like if Yahoo had bought them for $1m in 1996?
An underzealous government (in regards to antitrust) is as bad as the number of potential acquirers is smaller; in such a monopsony environment purchase prices will be smaller too.
Just because the acquired company falls into the "can't justify higher rev multiple thanks to synergies with the acquiring company" and "not successful enough for the IPO".
If there was no options in that niche, the market objectively would be a lot tougher.
Corporate consolidation is not a good end for capitalism. If you believe in the capitalist system you'd prefer that less acquisitions happen given that we've empirical data where a lot of these acquisitions are made to stamp out competition.
If the business model is to be acquired that will require the business model to change, I'd prefer that than a bunch of companies only working to be acquired, fucking customers in the process (and all of the externalities deriving from that, like wasted man-hours to move away from products that will be killed).
I think the state of “build to be acquired” is actually pretty gross and I wouldn’t mind it being pruned back a bit. To call this “overzealous government” is a bit ridiculous. Figma being acquired by Adobe was not good for customers, in most cases the government just allows shit like this to happen, this is the exception, not the rule.
I agree with your statistics and want to add extra context that these statistics are about (US?) _startups_. There are a lot of companies being started that don't pursue huge growth. I believe they are sometimes referred to as "mom and pop" shops in the US. In europe they're just called businesses or SME's.
I don't have any numbers and probably more than 50% do fail, but not 90%. Plenty of bakers, restaurants, accountants and small shops succeed in making money for the owners, employment for the staff and value for the customers.
> in most cases the government just allows shit like this to happen
Good. Agreements should as much as possible be free between consenting parties. It shouldn't be normal to expect the government to be involved in approving things except where there's a great reason to need it.
Especially things like when a company owns the entire town and pays their workers in scrip. Both the company and worker is a consenting party, so the government should stay out of it.
The problem with this ideology is that will destroy society and reduce it to ashes.
I'm really struggling to understand why you're asking questions tartly instead of just reading what I said, which I tried to make very simple to understand, and replying just as simply.
I've read it. I'm asking questions because I'm struggling to understand the point you're trying to make. I thought I understood, but your response was so far off of my intent that I'm no longer certain.
You said the government shouldn't involve itself "unless there's a great reason to do so," which I interpret as implying you disagree with the reasons. Do you think anti-trust measures are a great reason?
> The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired
The entire purpose of starting a company is to make a profit by delivering a product or service that the market will willingly buy. The operative word there is "profit" -- something that seems to have going conspicuously missing from companies that are being built for the purpose of being "exited".
> The entire purpose of starting a company is to make a profit by delivering a product or service that the market will willingly buy
Why? People can start companies for whatever reason, also your company itself can be the product and big tech companies might be the market you're targeting. Users might just be along for the ride (and they get cheaper and/or better products because VCs are willing to subsidize their development).
> The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired.
Certainly not in terms of expectation value. Most of the value of a startup at any given funding round is driven by the possibility of a public listing. This is true even though most successful startup outcomes are acquisitions.
> Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public.
> The entire purpose of starting a company is to get acquired.
I imagine this claim is satire, given how outlandish it is. But if I were to take it at face value for a second... Acquired by whom? Other companies... Who were started to... Get acquired themselves? Where did these other companies get the money to begin with? Etc. This is just a stupendously ridiculous take, I just cannot consider it was made in good faith.
> Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public.
YC is a droplet in the ocean of the economy. Even if we just look at the US, about five million businesses were started in 2022 alone. https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html
Public approval like this is a good signal to send to the regulators (and disapproval when they fail to do their job) -- it helps counterbalance the pressure from lobbyists and politicians aligned with industries.
I think more people talking about it publicly on social media will do. Today, social media seems to drive at least some part of traditional media coverage, and traditional media coverage at least in part drives political debate and at least a part of that drives actual policy.
I think public discourse on social media is close to being ruined by bots. Petitions which require id to authenticate might be a better measure, although has it's flaws for sure.
> talking about it publicly on social media will do
No way. Slacktivism is a pejorative for a reason. Compared to an upvote or a comment on [social media platform], a call or physical letter will have between 10 and 10,000 times the impact on your targeted public servant.
Possibly if you mention them, likely not even then. Most accounts are run by staffers.
Getting media attention is a long shot.
I asked the original question. I was hoping for a “here’s a list of people you can email or call or write to” resource.
Social media is better than nothing, but it would be a lot more impactful to go the extra distance to make sure it lands somewhere people are already looking.
The problem is nearly all company mergers, both big and small, are detrimental to competition...
Even my local corner store merging with a corner store in the next town over is bad for suppliers (combined negotiations when buying stock), and bad for consumers (prices set the same between the two towns).
I wonder what a world where company mergers were banned would look like?
coops usually seem like a net-win for everyone. If you ban mergers, that probably also impacts co-operations.
Joint-ventures might also be a postive. I can think of ARM, and the alignment in the automotive industry to standardise parts and platforms to lower total costs.
If companies can't be sold, there is less reason to start them.
In the mainstream economist view, mergers are generally good, both for the companies and society. If they don't produce some efficiency surplus, there is no reason for the companies to do them.
If instead of Adobe buying Figma, it was Adobe's biggest competitor, that would probably increase competition by making that company a more viable competitor to Adobe.
Every time a company merges, say 10% of the combined value of the new company is given to the government (perhaps with a discount if one or other of the merging companies has recently paid the merger tax).
The lack of the 10% fee for a company who didn't merge is effectively compensation for the fact it has less market control than peers in the same market who did merge.
>The problem is nearly all company mergers, both big and small, are detrimental to competition...
Mergers are not the only way in which market concentration happens though. You can't ban asset sales and you can't ban companies from hiring employees of weaker or defunct competitors.
If the owners of Figma decided that Figma wasn't viable as a standalone company, they could sell the software and fire all employees so they could be re-hired by whoever bought the software. No regulator in the world would mandate the software to be destroyed and the employees exiled.
Also, I don't think a market without mergers and acquisitions would necessarily be very competitive. It could well trend towards an equilibrium where a few big incumbants would rule their respective turfs unchallenged and a large number of tiny companies without the capital to do anything big.
I think merging legal entities is just a more efficient, less messy way of handling asset sales.
I really think we should distinguish between people providing goods to the public, for which there is an immediate need for competition, and B2B services like Figma. Monopolization of the former can cause active harm to individuals right now. Monopolization of the latter leads to... businesses having to spend more and provides incentives for other competitors. In particular, what I think a lot of people are missing is that this could be the end for Figma too. I'm going to guess the workers there were really hoping for a payout. If they don't get that, there's going to be de-motivation. Especially having basically been told they're too big to acquire. An IPO is possible, but the opportunity costs given the current markets are almost too much to bear. I feel sorry for them.
Any policy that disincetivizes growth by unsustainable practices is good policy IMO. We need less companies who's end goal is getting acquired, and more that are in it to build a self sustainable business. Having employee motivation hinge on a acquisition is one of the most toxic business practices.
My general rule of thumb is that unless the company is putting you in a position where you actually get to drive, stock should be treated only as icing on the cake of an already worth while salary. (Unless it's a publicly traded company where you can reasonably assert that stock price will most likely go up or stay around the same)
This is sad for the overall M&A market. Companies are going to be scared to enter into these agreements because it’s just a waste of time and money when it inevitably ends up like this.
While I agree that this deal was ultimately bad for consumers, weaker M&A markets, in the long run, may hurt consumers equally as bad. A lot of “copycat” companies get created when they see a particular company doing well. While sheer profitability is the major factor in this, M&A, and the likelihood of a liquidity event play a large role here too.
Hopefully future us won’t look back at this deal as the beginning of a weak M&A market
The value accrues in the form of incentivizing new products and companies to enter the market. The two options these founders (and their investors) have to capitalize on building a good company is to either go public or get acquired.
Severely limiting the ability to be acquired reduces the incentives for new founders as well as investors in new companies if the only realistic path is waiting for them to go public. Especially since being acquired doesn't require you to be in nearly as good a financial position in terms of profit as going public does.
I can't think of a single time that was overall beneficial for the US in the last decade. A bunch of time sucking sites I don't consider life improving. It won't stop small business and it'll stop big companies from their shitty VC style squeeze everyone out of the market tactic? I don't mind losing that 'value'.
However, product innovation doesn't happen without competition. Acquisitions aren't necessarily bad, but a company being bought by a competitor with a similar product lessens competition and can lead to less innovation.
There’s a bigger picture than just the consumer. If there is not a chance to exit then founders won’t be incentivized to create these companies and employees won’t be incentivized to join or stay at these companies. If M&A markets are limited then the only option is IPO which goes through major cycles and probably can’t support the number of companies needed. Plus many companies can’t get big enough to IPO.
Is this true? I assume there must be founders who won't start companies if they can't get acquired, but I'm not one of them. And I think my closest friends aren't either.
Do companies like YouTube and Instagram get started and funded less frequently if the climate evolves to “it’s impossible to have large mergers approved”?
It’s a bit like asking in 2009 if the secondary mortgage market is a valuable market worth having. It provides significant good (IMO) to support real estate transactions.
But, I don't think that YouTube or Instagram are an inherent moral requirement for society, so I don't think it's the end of the world if they never existed.
It's sad for the bad part of the M&A market that is against competition. there's tons of good M&A that will still get approved. it's not bad that companies need to think twice and consider anti-trust before getting deals done
Thank fucking god. I am worried though that Figma will take the cancellation fee and start the layoffs to maximize it for an eventual IPO, and then blame the merger.
That’s a reasonable worry because that’s a reasonable path for the company to take, isn’t it?
Try to sell to the buyer who would maximize the return to company [shareholders]; when that falls through, take whatever the next best path for them is.
Figma is VC-funded. Now that they’re not going to be part of Adobe, they’ll just more slowly turn into another Adobe because the investors want the exit.
Prices will creep up, product segmentation will be introduced, pop-ups pushing expensive service add-ons will eventually appear. And when the revenue number is pumped enough, it goes public or is sold to private equity which has no trouble with antitrust regulators.
In terms of pricing model Adobe is generous compared to Figma. Someone with their own creative cloud subscription can open my .psd's. But if I want to collaborate with someone in Figma, I need to pay for their access even if they have their own paid Figma account.
But even so, Figma's prices have been increasing, the product is being segmented, they're increasingly pushing for various addons, even if Figma still is cheaper than Adobe.
Yes. Which is why I’m surprised that people seem to think this break-up will prevent Figma from turning into yet another Adobe-like SaaS with heavy upsell.
Given how Adobe's last purchase of a drawing program (buying Macromedia ten years after being told to wait a decade after buying Aldus and it being split off to be acquired by Macromedia and then off-shoring Freehand/MX to India and then burying it), good.
I still keep a copy of CS6 on my windows machine just for access to fireworks. I should probably learn something new at this point but there is just something about the presentation of the canvas, pixel snapping, and palettes that I can't give up.
I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe's decision to phase it out resulted in all these new UI design apps to appear in the market (Sketch, InVision, Figma, etc).
The US should start doing something about these foreign governments meddling in US business before it's too late.
EU and UK and seemingly everyone else is passing laws and setting up bureaucracies specifically to implement unfair trade restrictions and barriers against US companies and they're basically doing it unopposed, you'd think these actions would at least trigger some tariff threats and WTO complains sadly the government is in a self destruct spiral at the moment.
Let's forget Europe and let's focus on the US market alone.
If we do the math, we have to ask - where would those 20 billion dollars come from that were to be paid by Adobe to Figma investors? I'm sure not from Adobe's coffers, their bean counters would place them onto subscription pricing with a time cap to recoup all that cost. For sure.
I would assume that regulators aren't unaware of that in the said markets (UK/Europe) and are not pro investor (few hundreds) rather pro consumers (millions)
Total investment is around 350 million dollars. Adobe is paying 20 billion dollars.
What company is making money in this?
It is the investors that poured in 300+ million were going to have a massively inflated payback day, later compensated and loaded on to the backs of unsuspecting end users.
Investors get rewarded for their early bets, and Adobe gets to bet on future profits and growth by acquiring some valuable assets and hiring some talented people this is exactly how it should work.
Great news. Adobe is already the kind of company that should be forcefully closed down for scamming people with their subscription practices.
The sign up, and cancelling process of their various services are so "dark design" it's criminal. I've had to wait in a chat window for days to have a service cancelled after signing up for something i clearly didn't sign up for, a yearly payment instead of a monthly with no warning for a very expensive suit, and many are in the same boat almost bankrupting entire small companies.
More and more places does this and they should all banned and their CEO's put in jail because they prey on vulnerable people, steal millions and waste everyone else's time.
I'm not kidding one bit with the jail thing, lines have been crossed so much it's getting ridiculous now, i don't care how rich or powerful you are. This is why we need strict regulation and serious consequences for CEO's and shareholders of straight up criminal companies.
>The point is the value of not having Figma sell to its largest competitor.
Adobe does not compete with Microsoft in any meaningful way. There is some overlap in some products here or there, but it's not meaningful competition.
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.
If I was Figma, and I had to choose, I would go with Adobe. Adobe would have made Figma a core strategic product and would have made them much more relevant in a space that they deeply care about. Microsoft would never care that much about Figma, because the design/UX space isn't core to Microsoft. Also, Figma is too small for Microsoft to make it a centrepiece of any of their strategic initiatives.
It's rumored Dylan Field (CEO of Figma) approached Microsoft [1] around the same time they were talking to Adobe but Microsoft declined to make a deal at the time (seemingly due to Microsoft's then in-process $69billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard).
Yes and no. Everything is fine until you hit the 2gb limit. The average professional laptop has a 16gb ram. Figma is not only the vector app. If someone wants serious vector work, Illustrator and Affinity Designer provide a solution.
Figma is more than this, and the complexity of the workflows requires offline support and more memory available to the app.:)
Has performance in Sketch fallen in recent years? I know it's not as popular any more, but years ago when I used Sketch the performance was always top notch.
I used sketch around 2017-2018 and the performance was really bad. Much worse than Illustrator. At the time I was on a top of the line 5K iMac.
Currently on an M2 Pro MBP and Figma is more responsive than Affinity Design. The latest versions of Illustrator have had a bunch of GPU rendering issues that affect performance. In fact these issues were the reason I started using Figma.
I tried to cancel an Adobe CC subscription the other day and they wanted to clawback $60 for a $120 yearly subscription. And their customer support wasn’t helpful at all. Needless to say, we don’t need more of this kind of behavior, especially with Figma!
I've been there too, it turns out to be a battle of persistence.
I just kept the chat window open for 3 hours one afternoon while working, replying every 5 minutes that no, it wasn't acceptable, and I wouldn't pay anything. Slowly they started reducing the amount until they got to 0.
At points they got extremely aggressive, but from reading other people's stories online, that's just part of their training.
Figma's employees are probably devastated and demotivated. Their exit dollar signs just went poof. And they've probably been working on Adobe's roadmap / integration for the past 15 months.
I'm not so sure Figma is in a better spot, even with this new cash in hand.
Good point, and I agree, but nevertheless the product itself will probably suffer less in the current situation, and meanwhile Figma gets another bite at the apple down the road, and that might be a MUCH bigger bite and apple later.
What if some of the people behind this very effective and successful tool are there because they're enthusiastic about the work they're doing?
I'd bet cash money that there are at least some for whom the paycheck means they can do their thing and not have to take a day job. These are the sorts of people who create a Figma instead of an enshittification.
The trick is always to get paid something instead of having to get a day job. And I'm sure there are folks who 'have to come into work' and are still doing good and worthy jobs… but man! You figure they are all like that? At Figma, of all places?
Never work in the music business, is all I can say. Or filmmaking. There are entire industries that ride on the ability to wildly underpay talented people just so they can do the things they're excited about doing. Far from 'not promising a huge payout', you can absolutely screw large numbers of people if they get to hear the band play, or get to look through the viewfinder and see the rushes.
> and they've probably been working on Adobe's roadmap / integration for the past 15 months.
$1B would be enough to cover that completely, but as a person who has been in companies that have been acquired. (multiple times), that's not really how it works.
I've never worked anywhere that started working on integrating or unifying roadmaps before the contracts were inked and the deal fully ratified.
> I've never worked anywhere that started working on integrating or unifying roadmaps before the contracts were inked and the deal fully ratified.
Because it's not really legal. I've been a similar situation previously, and we were specifically forbidden from working on any integration projects until the deal closed, as in the legal department gave a company-wide presentation on exactly what kind of work was and wasn't allowed (e.g. obviously execs/legal folks could work towards completing the merger, but working on actual engineering integration was expressly forbidden).
They were not devastated or demotivated. The morale is still high from what I heard from the inside. 1B is 5% of the original deal. Without liquidating any equity, they can get 5% of the original payout, which is still large! (I think Dylan Field the CEO might do this, to make the team happy. I can imagine the outside investor being left out on this, since this is not a liquidation event, then even more “free” money for the team)
Also, they are not working on any Adobe roadmap. Other than a few offsite brainstorm session, no real work has been put into integrating with Adobe.
I wonder what this does to their valuation? It's not really my area so I don't know, but once a company is willing to buy you at a certain price, you're kinda "worth" that price right?
In all fairness, I thought GitHub got tons of useful features after the acquisition. The stability definitely felt like it suffered, but I kinda just chalked that up to growth and difficulty stabilizing new features. But at least recently its stability seems to have improved (no jinxing...)
This really makes me sad as an aspiring entrepreneur.
What would be the use of starting a business if the government can arbitrarily block it from being acquired?
I understand this happening in Europe but not America.
I think America is going to lag behind in tech entrepreneurship just like Europe and I wonder what the next potential tech entrepreneurship hub will be.
Perhaps you could aim to actually make money through your business? As in, selling a product at a profit? Taking dividends? I know it sounds wild, but that's how it went down in the olden days.
Ummm. This seems like a huge overreaction. Do you think the founder of Figma -- which is still worth $B's, making him obscenely wealthy 'on paper' (but 'on paper' in a way that most wealth is counted) -- plus, he likely sold enough via secondaries during the later rounds to be set for life -- is bemoaning his career path?
Furthermore, there's something like 20k M&A deals / yr completed in North America alone, the majority that are still life-changing wealth creation events for the founders.
So don't despair - 1 problematic anti-competitive M&A deal blocked by the government does not signal the end of entrepreneurship in the US.
What I find most sad about entrepreneurship is that almost all the successful founders appear to have been 'chosen' by a famous VC or investor. It's almost like what you do doesn't really matter. I've seen some 'chosen entrepreneurs' keep failing and they keep getting second, third, fourth chances and eventually succeed. Being chosen seems to be the most important element for success. But how to become chosen? It seems so random, in a world of 8 billion people, you need to be hand-picked by one of maybe 100 people... And the criteria is weird; basically they need to like you and for that to happen, you basically need to remind them of a young version of themselves... Which is not something you can control.
If you're very different, none of the famous investors will like you (that's assuming they even learn about your existence) and your chances in this industry will be very bad.
Hey friend - you're wrong on this, although I understand how it might be comforting to think this is all some vast elite conspiracy.
The reality is that you "become chosen" by building a company that is growing very quickly in a big market. That's it.
Most successful startups didn't wait around for some name-brand VC to pick them (that's the most anti-entrepreneur mindset I can think of). The big funding happens much later than the initial traction and momentum.
Yes, you have to be personable enough to be able to talk to clients, investors, recruit top talent, etc -- but that's not the VC arbitrarily choosing whether they like you or not -- that's a cold reality of being a great founder.
I don't believe that for a second given how tightly controlled all the social media and search engines algorithms are. I've never met anyone ever who built a successful software company who wasn't well connected to some elite.
How is that a comforting thought? It's difficult to imagine anything more disturbing. At least if I admitted I was just a failure by my own hand, it would be much easier as I could try to improve myself. It would look like there is a small chance. That would be far more comforting.
I am currently working for a company with a few thousands employees around the world.
The founder is still the CEO owning a majority of shares and his second and third in command (or their families) hold most of the remaining shares. He's getting close to retirement and probably will do so in a few years passing the torch on to his children.
AFAIK he came from a very upper middle class background but not real wealth and kept the company alive by being profitable (not Tech margins though). That seems to be a quite sustainable business model that made him, his cofounders wealthy enough to not worry about money even we'd close tomorrow.
Nothing wrong with that and certainly something an aspiring entrepreneur could aim for. It's more difficult though and you need to run a tight ship at times and actually think longterm and how to sustain your business.
There seems to be some misconceptions here. This wasn’t arbitrary. Most acquisitions are not blocked. The US government can block a lot of things for companies, but is generally speaking pro-business. That said there’s a longish history of regulating monopolies, in order to benefit consumers and the economy, so no evidence of a new trend wrt Europe based on this case. (Consider whether that history may be part of why the US had a lead in tech entrepreneurship in the first place.)
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadI wander if that will make its way to early employees who were hoping for a liquidity event.
“On December 17, 2023, the Company and Figma mutually agreed to terminate the Merger Agreement and entered into a mutual termination agreement effective as of such date (the “Termination Agreement”). The mutual termination of the Merger Agreement was approved by the Company’s and Figma’s respective Boards of Directors. In accordance with the terms of the Termination Agreement, the Company will make a cash payment to Figma in the previously agreed amount of one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) (the “Termination Fee”) within three business days following the date thereof. The Termination Fee is the sole and exclusive remedy under the Merger Agreement, and the Company and Figma have each waived any and all other claims in connection with the Merger Agreement and the transactions contemplated thereby.”
Three business days to wire $1b, the week before Christmas. That has to be a fun phone call with the bank.
It wasn't that big of a project either...
If you think im joking no I’ve designed it for major banks.
For a business like Adobe, yes. They’ll probably want a verification call. Plenty of funds, however, handle similarly-sized transactions with completely electronic verifications.
For large payrolls, it would be done over wire (between the employer and payroll processor). The employer has leverage and wants to keep the float.
For many payroll operations between big employers and payroll processors it’s an inner bank ledger transfer as the big payroll processors have good reason to maintain accounts at many banks.
Vice versa is also true. If you have a very large payroll your treasury team is not put out by having accounts at lots of banks.
This is common. But so are wires.
https://youtu.be/7C1Zaqu0wrw
On the bank side nothing really happens unless Figma decides it wants to withdrawal all 1 billion. Then X bank will owe Y bank money, that loan will be balanced at some point. It will probably take a few days so Figma will be told it needs a few days.
Even if Figma decides to pay all their employees a share, that's also just - 50k Figma, + 50k Bob Smith in a computer somewhere.
There is no actual exchange of money until stuff is balanced at some point or you withdrawal. It's all just 1s and 0s in a record.
That was at least so when we sold our company.
Their latest report with the SEC would indicate how much “cash” they regularly have on hand.
A failed acquisition attempt can be very damaging to the company being acquired. You can lose employees who don’t want to work at the new entity that never happened. It can change your product roadmap (are you really going to invest in directions the acquirer won’t want after completion?) and make your executive team start job hunting. Etc.
So it’s not unreasonable or uncommon for the acquirer to agree to such a provision. And the board was presumably highly involved in a large offer like that.
The Board signed off on the deal. Given Adobe’s stock is up for the day, I don’t think shareholders are crying over this termination fee.
Is that allowed?
Banks can handle this. But probably not for free.
"He also noted that the original terms call for Adobe to pay a $1 billion break-up fee even if the deal falls through over regulatory issues."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/adobe-stock-figma-acquisiti...
except it also made Adobe more valuable than it ever was before and pretty much jump-started the ARR / SaaS valuation model that defines Tech today, so it's not ever going away
I would even pay $500 for a LR Classic without all of their other crapware, but they just like that too much to take my money.
Yeah..
See also, "Adobe says the FTC is looking into its subscription cancellation practices." https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24003532/adobe-says-the-...
It's not that far. A bureaucrat will decide if you can exit the way you want to. Still want to fund this venture?
> And we are soooooo far from having a shortage of tech startups.
Because there hasn't been a fear of them blocking exits.
It's not up to the bureaucrat but to the courts. The FTC doesn't "approve" or "reject" deals--it can just take legal action to try to stop a deal, but that still gets adjudicated either in a federal court or in an FTC administrative law court to a judge which is appointed independently.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/merger-review
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/administrative-law-...
Depending on specifics, the EU stopping blockbuster acquisitions in the US startup ecosystem feels ripe for abuse.
FWIW, I think there are good reasons to limit tech consolidation, including this one. But anyone should realize that it will reshape the industry in unpredictable ways, including some that harm "real" consumers and builders.
If anything, IMHO, we've been too lenient with anti-trust in Tech in particular over the past 5-10 years. This just dials things back a little, and makes it so that "hard to quantify" risk is a little more likely than it was before, and certainly a little more likely than zero
I don't think Adobe / Figma specifically is an "otherwise obvious deal" precisely because it has such obvious anti-trust risk. The fact that this merger was even announced is all the proof I need that we were being too lenient. Figma can still sell to any number of huge Tech companies
Blocking acquisitions creates precedents.
In fact, there are all kinds of things you can't arbitrarily do because it hurts consumers, both physically and financially. This includes strengthening industry monopolies which has time and time again demonstrated that it causes incredible harm to entire segments of society.
I don't think you can take a hypothetical worst case and make it apply here. You could also say that we shouldn't have governments, because look at WW2 and all the war they declared.
Adobe buying Figma wouldn't cause incredible harm to entire segments of society. It's barely even a monopoly, in that Adobe doesn't really do what Figma does already, and there is incredible potential in just making another Figma competitor if Adobe ruins Figma.
If this is the liquidity event that Figma were betting on from day 1 that's their mistake for not foreseeing regulators being unhappy about it.
I get people are dying to stick it to the big tech cos, but the reality is that the long-term effect of actions like this is reduced funding and less new, disruptive companies – and strengthening the situation for the cash-rich behemoths like Microsoft, Google, etc.
> and strengthening the situation for the cash-rich behemoths like Microsoft, Google, etc.
It certainly isn't good for Adobe as they will have a strong competitor in Figma to deal with.
It is good for Adobe: they'll be forced to make their products better.
...I hope!
Which they thought was harder than spending $20 billion acquiring a competitor.
Adobe's despised reputation in business practices makes it hard for users to choose Adobe when any other creative option when it is available.
This is not as much about Figma, which is big already and will be fine, but the 100 other potential Figmas that might not even been started yet. They will have more difficulty finding funding, attracting employees with equity, etc., when the scenario 'big tech co acquires company for lots of $' doesn't exist anymore.
Why would anyone go worth at a small company for equity if there's no chance to get liquidity? Why would investors invest? This decision might improve the short-term situation of the market, but over the long-term, I can only see how it benefits the big companies, which rely on today's cashflows / RSUs to attract people.
Are you saying that the business of "we make a thing and we ask for money from our users for said thing" model cannot work?
> Why would anyone go worth at a small company for equity if there's no chance to get liquidity? Why would investors invest?
Presumably because they hope the company become successful and it sells many licences and they get a share from that pile of money.
I'm saying that companies like Figma, which has raised $333 million dollars in venture capital, at up to a $10bn valuation, cannot exist if those investors don't see sufficient options for liquidity.
And given that people strongly value companies like Figma, as evident in this very thread, that would be a bad outcome all in all. The only market participants for whom this wouldn't be a bad outcomes would be big, established businesses that have to fear less startup competition.
We value Figma the product. I couldn't care less about how much money they raised.
This is why I'm asking if you think it is impossible to make a Figma like product financed from you know the users paying for that product.
Ok. But do you think that is the only way it could have been built? Somehow you are sidestepping that question.
We were promised a radical new world, what we got was a couple of apps for fast food delivery from McDonald's.
Last one: I promise that I am not trolling here: What about psuedo-self-driving that Tesla and a few others have in cars now? On an expressway, it is pretty amazing -- hands off the wheel, talk with your friends with no worries of distraction.
How are you okay with MSFT? The logic is not very sound
- Product life-cycles become short, consumers are weary of anything new. How many times have you seen product launches here on HN where the top comments are worrying about sustainability? That either there will be a rug-pull for consumers in the future, or they just plan to be acquired and shut down.
- Larger companies continue to have no incentive to actually improve their product and compete with others if they just purchase everything in the market.
"Aim for the moon so if you miss you still end up amongst the stars."
The actual _goal_ is to be an independent successful company, but getting bought is the back up option that provides a safety net. If it was success-or-bust (no "-or-get-bought") the risk calculus would not make it worth it. It would make the American economy much more conservative and much more like Europe.
We should be encouraging way more medium-sized companies, that operate sustainable business models, make money for their founders and employees, and aren't subsidized by cheap money. I think if startups actually had to sustain themselves we'd see a lot less grift and waste in VC.
For me, yes, I see the obvious argument that more money leads to more (and faster) innovation. But it can also result in an economy that is too tightly coupled and dependent on the might of a few massive companies, whereas an economy that is distributed across more smaller businesses is more robust.
At the extreme, you might imagine South Korea: a country that is highly consolidated into one or two major cities and propped up by massive, economy-shaping corporations. I don't think anyone would disagree that Korea made massive economic strides in a short period of time, but I think there's much more debate about the long-term health of the Korean economy and people now that their continued prosperity is so centralized.
And, of course, there's the consumer angle; though I can't claim any scientific methodology, my impression of the sentiments surrounding this merger are that it was pretty popular with Figma's investors and employees (understandably so, as they stood to gain from the merger), but was deeply unpopular with their customers. You could make the argument that "a Figma owned by Adobe is better than no Figma at all," but consumers have seen it all before at this point: a good product is acquired, and then either a) the pricing model changes, b) the rate of innovation slows down, c) the product is ultimately abandoned somewhere down the line, etc, etc. None of these outcomes are essential truths, but they are common outcomes of companies getting larger and larger to the point where a business unit that is otherwise healthy is deprioritized because it is not profitable enough or growing fast enough for the larger parent to care; or, conversely, the smaller parts suffer because the larger parent encounters trouble and can no longer sustain their acquisitions, even if they are keeping the bloat afloat.
Unless you are thinking of real companies that would be affected by this ban? Retail stores don't care about this ban. Companies that sell real products wouldn't care. If they sell real software services and plan to turn a positive profit rather than exit this wouldn't impact anyone other than unicorn chasers, which are bad for everyone.
So by your own definition, real companies are affected by this!
Anti-trust is not a new thing, it's even considered a foundational aspect of competitive capitalism by some thinkers...
Instead, smaller companies can start and slowly get bigger while getting bigger. Affinity suite is a great example. While their photo tool is not my cup of tea, designer is great, IMHO.
Let's say you're pitching your startup to a potential investor. Would you pitch it as "the next Adobe" or "something Adobe might want to buy"? Which one would you be more likely to invest in?
I get your point, but that is not really the right framing because that is not how to pitch your startup.
Tell me what it does, what its long term vision is, how and by when you’ll make money, what’s your moat, how you will grow.
However, as a customer, I absolutely hate this. Instead of finding a way to actually make the product/service self-sustainable, they just increase the number of (usually) free users. But once they sell, normally the new owner either shuts the service down or turns it into crap.
It just happened that mergers and acquisitions turned out to be the cleanest, easiest way for founders to hand over the reins. In days past, companies would go through this transition process internally, often by succession through the founder’s family. The founder may have been a very entrepreneurial type, but the child who was raised to be the successor was more of a managerial type. When it worked out, anyway. Sometimes none of the founder’s kids were suitable. Or the founder tapped the wrong kid to take over.
I doubt very much if this will stop funding of new companies except perhaps at the level of Uber/WeWork.
How about you go and fling yourself in front of a bus
You have to threaten their customer support with legal complaints to make them comply with it, it's super frustrating to deal with. They do fold immediately when you do this though, so they know it's illegal but hope the frustration of getting through customer support will deter people (and avoids the legal problems).
And yes I know you can just switch subscriptions and use the early cancellation period there to avoid the hit back fee from cancelling. It's the principle that's scummy.
If a bank doesn't offer these, next best thing is to go to the bank that does.
My current bank (Wise) also offers virtual debit cards. I am in the UK now and Wise works well. I still use both since I still have my American bank account though.
They will try to scare you and ultimately won't go after you because the legality of this for b2c is very very iffy (because of the way they present the information on the sale page, which doesn't meet any informed consent level required). At least in my country, apparently in NL too, and if it ever got to the European level it would be smashed easily.
I doubt this. The early termination fee is 50% what you were obligated to pay. If Adobe got rid of this than consumers would have to pay 100% of this. De wet van Dam is about the about not being able to cancel the subscription itself and not about being able to pay to get out of what you were suppsoed to pay for a subscription period.
Keep in mind there is a normal monthly subscription and when buying the product the three choices of monthly, annual billed monthly, and yearly billed up front are equally displayed.
9 months after Adobe announced it was to purchase Figma (and 3 months before it hoped the deal would close), Adobe discontinued XD.
> Adobe discontinued XD
That was my understanding as well, hmm
I couldn't disagree more. Fireworks was a perfect blend of raster and vector editing and was killer for early 2000s web design work. It was an amazing Macromedia product that got neglected by Adobe.
If I'm in a cynical mood I sometimes think it's because an up-to-date Fireworks would have cannibalized the sales of PS/AI, but I think that gives too much credit to Adobe.
Judging by the 20bil price they wanted to pay, I guess they know what kind of investment would be needed to compete now.
It's way easier to produce something that can go live right now without much editing in CivitAI -> Upscale in Magnific -> Add to Canva.
Just go to any model and click "Create". You can even use examples from the model to prefill the prompt.
For example, you can scroll down and click "Start Creating" on this page: https://civitai.com/images/3908138
This stuff is wildly productive for noobs who just want to get stuff out. Maybe its not something you'd see in an Apple ad, but its definitely something you'll see in a small business ad.
Not using the latest and greatest tools in your profession isn't really a flex.
Firefly (Adobe's generative AI) works well if you're already stuck in a Photoshop-heavy workflow, for quick successive generations right in the canvas if you're editing or extending an existing image. Better than Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugins I've tried.
But with Photoshops, I can generate things to be seamlessly placed into my existing scene, with it understanding things like placing the wheels of the car it just inserted on the ground, with a shadow underneath and such, again seamlessly integrated with my existing image.
It's very much not just about generating an entirely new AI image.
Can I do that with Tensorart/CivitAI?
Eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No1_sq-i_5U
You can do that with any part of the image, this video shows a face sample.
https://youtu.be/Sp6K3qpVFO0?t=95
But at the very least, it seems like it's easier to work with in Photoshop.
https://vectorart.ai/
https://www.kittl.com/feature/ai-text-to-vector
Back when communication latency was days or weeks, allowing sticky auto-renew that ignored payment failure and asked for a lot of heads up time on a cancellation made sense. It was exploitable, but it was worth it to buffer the latency. Now we don't have the latency, so it's just exploitable, the law hasn't caught up yet, and Adobe is happy to exercise this advantage against you.
It's not that Adobe's depending on subscription engineering, it's creative pros 100% dependent on Adobe products being willing to put up with this shit because they have quality products with no alternatives.
I work for a huge org, and we tell companies like this to go fuck off with terms like this. The real scam of Adobe is that there is no way to assess engagement rates with their tools. The only way to get this data is by metering PCs or datamining your IdP.
Unfortunately, the same is true for Illustrator. There are competitors that have 95% of the features, but that remaining 5% is critical for serious professionals.
Adobe CC not strong enough? That's not it.
Subscription retention practices like this are to juice quarterly numbers to delight analysts on the earnings calls. If Adobe was a private company this level of lock-in desperation wouldn't be necessary. We'd still be able to buy the software once like we used to.
This kind of product economics comes from Wall Street. It's led to a world where companies, rather than charging at a stable price point that allows them to keep the lights on, offer something at an unsustainable $10/mo to build marketshare. Then they raise the price every year after that, whether or not the additions made have any added value.
While your whimsical comment might apply to some rent seeking subscription products, as phrased, it does seem like you are totally out of line with it application in this thread.
Of course if you’re relying on such gotchas to keep subscription numbers up you’ve already failed and are just on a slow march to irrelevance while leaving pain and destruction in your wake.
Great news, where do I testify? Adobe tried to bribe me personally to not fight their subscription cancellation policies for the company I was representing. Given how obviously unimpressed I was with the whole thing and how I was clearly not the target market of a creative cloud subscription, I can only assume that this is a policy that the sales rep tried to push, rather than a one-off they thought might work.
Please consider your next steps carefully though and contact legal counsel basically immediately since you just publicly accused adobe representatives of a federal crime! Frankly, I would ask Dan to remove your comment ASAP.
Fun Fact: The SEC offers financial incentives to people who report those violations!
But "Domestic Bribery Act" seems to be a hallucination. I have so far only encountered fake sources or links that don't exist, this kind of hallucination is new and unexpected.
Thanks for making me aware of this, quite scary how utterly convincing chatGPT was in this instance.
I don’t think it’s new or unexpected at all. Remember the lawyers who used ChatGPT and it ended up fabricating case law?
ChatGPT is interesting and all but it’s seriously untrustworthy.
The advice of "STFU and get the comment removed" is spot on.
I wouldn't be (and am not) making this sort of accusation on behalf of any operating company without prior approval.
Is that even legal?
I can't tell if this is a general statement about monopolies or a statement about Adobe's products.
The VC market will dry up even more if they see their chances of an exit diminishing because of an overzealous government.
Both those things can be true and both can be legitimate interests.
> profit from doing so
Is the first actually a requirement? I can think of plenty of companies that do the second part well, but have nothing to do with the first one.
I understand you think they provide a service since you seem to not understand what a patent troll is.
As a reminder, a patent troll company is a company "that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll)
They don't sell any services, don't do any (reasonable) licensing, nor provide any goods.
Not to mention “trolling” is already passing judgement on the activity to begin with. The actual service is licensing. I’ll leave it to the courts to determine whether enforcement of patents qualifies as trolling or not.
Oh I'm sorry. I meant to say "Patent Trolling Companies", is it easier to understand now?
I'm sure you are aware that there actually is a category of companies that just participate in "patent trolling", and do nothing else. Not sure why you're being so pedantic about the grammar instead of trying to reply to the actual arguments...
They don't seem to be significant enough to the overall general statement that companies exist to serve their customers with goods and/or services.
I'm not sure how valuable it is to argue with someone who cannot read two messages up in the message hierarchy...
Do you mean the one you mentioned 4 messages up? And dropped with this?
> Ok, lets hear you argue for what service a patent troll provides.
Sure - the one you dropped was domain flipping. Clearly buying something at a certain price and then selling it again is not nothing - that's why people pay for it. Just like house flipping. Or just buying anything speculatively. I assume you realised that, and dropped it for that reason.
In the vast sea of companies, those are a super teeny tiny share of companies.
The purpose of a company is to make a profit and provide a good or service. In that order. Everything else is a hobby.
Generally speaking, private non-subsidized companies that offer goods and services for sale cannot actually survive without any profit, right? They can bootstrap for a while with investment, but they tend to die, statistically speaking, if they prioritize goods and services over profit. The way companies tend to survive death is by doing everything they can to ensure that the sale of their goods or services generates a profit. You might also be temporarily forgetting that it’s also incredibly common for companies to pivot on what products they make and sell whenever they’re not making enough profit.
TBH it actually seems really funny to me argue about which comes first, because the kind of company we’re talking about needs both, it doesn’t otherwise exist. But the idea parent shared, that profit takes the highest priority, is often absolutely true in practice, many companies will do everything they can to avoid not making a profit, from lowering the quality of their goods and services, to coming up with other more profitable products, to merging with another company that has more customers for your product and/or a longer runway.
That has changed, especially since the 80s, where the prevalent world view turned to "let's have the market figure out purpose", which equates to anything that is profitable is good.
We've since learned that this isn't automatically true (as exemplified in this abandoned merger, for example), and my understanding is that right now there's no clear opinion in society whether profit or purpose comes first in companies.
The vast majority of companies are little "lifestyle" businesses without any intention of ever getting acquired by anyone. Your local pizza shop doesn't expect to be a unicorn.
That said, even a mom & pop should be mindful of exit. What happens when the owner(s) wants to retire? Or has a serious health issue? Or has a family member with a health issue? Etc.?
You don't have to be a unicorn to build something that someone else wants to acquire.
Editorial: And this is why I dislike words like solopreneur, mompreneur, and so on. Sure you can have a one person business with a steady revenue stream. But that's not a 'preneur. If you are the business and the business is you, you're ability to exit is highly limited. That's not a 'preneur. If you get hit by a bus and your customers are screwed and the business tanks. That's not a 'preneur. You're much closer to a m&p TBH.
I realize that's counter to conventional wisdom on social media, but such snake oil ideas deserve to be called out already.
> What happens when the owner(s) wants to retire?
Maybe they just close down the shop.
> Or has a serious health issue?
And purchase disability insurance.
Being a mom & pop is not the same as being an entrepreneur. They are two separate mindsets. One use exit as a North Star the other just retires and closes up shop.
There's nothing wrong with the mom & pop mindset. But it's not the same mindset as being an entrepreneur and focusing on value; with exit being a clear and ideal way to see the value.
You might not like the definition, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Even if we accept your assertion that it's the best way to value something, that doesn't mean it's the only way to value something.
It comes from The Market. It comes from some other entity saying, "This is worth X to us, and we're willing to pay that. Here's an offer."
THAT is value. I've already said this, but I'll say it again:
Revenue !== value.
Value is what someone is willing to pay (for the company). It is set by the market. Revenue may or may not be used by the suitor to determine value, that is, how much they're willing to pay to acquire the generated value.
Revenue !== Value
To clarify, they are all business in the legal sense. But a "solopreneur" who gets hits by a bus, leaves customers high and dry, and can't exit (i.e., have someone else carry on) is not to compared to an entrepreneur who generates value such that an exit is possible, and customers are less likely to get screwed.
Notice the modifier. That indicates it is not the only (and to many people, not even the most important) type of value.
At the extreme, imagine all these social media "creators". In some cases, tons of revenue. But their revenue-producing-hobby is such that no one could take the torch and carry on. If that person is abducted by aliens, the company also disappears. No one else can buy it and carry on. That is, no value created.
I'll keep repeating this:
Revenue !== value
Entrepreneurs create value. Not revenue. Value.
The problem with this thread seems to be that people are confusing revenue with value. If it was about revenue, then the definition would say that. It specifically says value.
Or again, the "influencer" model. TONS of revenue but when was the last time you heard of such a person selling? They're not because there's no value. The influences walks away, the house of cards collapses. No one is going to pay for that. So, sorry, no value - regardless of revenue.
Therefore, if you ever want to know the value of your business as a reflection of the alleged value it creates, put it up for sale (or sell shares). You will quickly find out if you're actually creating value or not, or at least someone thinks you have the potential to create value. But that isn't revenue.
That's it. You want to measure value? Then be prepared to ask the market (i.e., exit) Anything else is a proxy, a deception, or something you tell yourself to make yourself feel good.
It's bizarre that we live in a time where we can't even fathom a business that is fundamentally very profitable, we just envision growing the company until it's attractive enough for someone else to take on the unsustainable cost of running the business: either get acquired by a large company or hoist your debt onto the public market.
Investment really did used to be about more than a complex "greater fool" game.
Sorry, but it absolutely is. Entrepreneurship is just starting a business and taking on the majority of the risks and rewards. There is nothing in the definition that says you have to sell the business or exit in any way.
I'd argue that taking on VC money is actually less entrepreneurial than going it alone - you're offloading a big chunk of the risk to your investors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurship
https://www.google.com/search?q=define+entrepreneur
You're confused.
Exactly!
But sure, I'll entertain you...
Person 1 is a so called solopreneur. Works hard. Pays bills. But eventually burns out and because no one want her/his "shares", she/he closes shop. "Damn I wish they told me about exit and the value there of...," she/he thinks. A hobby that produces revenue is not the same as producing value.
Person 2 is also solo. Does the same (i.e., works hard, etc). But she/he is constantly concerned about the shareholders. Sure, it just so happens those shareholders are her/him. Nonetheless, there are - in the mind of P2 - shareholders. Eventually, she/he sells the company to some other entity for a respectable amount of money (read: value purely defined).
Person 2 !== Person 1. No way. No how.
Again, I ask, what defines value better than, "We'll pay you for your company."? (Hint: Nuttin' does.)
Friend, the confusion is all yours. You can contort it all you want, but The Truth is:
"We want your company" === value.
p.s. A Google search? That's funny. SERPs? Talk about a lesson in lack of value.
My old boss closed shop. Didn't want to fuss with selling to someone. He'd generated plenty of economic value to retire on and travel around the world for his retirement years. Nice big house, boat, no debt, lots in the bank. Profits for his clients, salaries for his workers, revenue to his selected vendors.
No acquisition. Plenty of economic value generated.
You can continue to be aggressively wrong and watch your comments descend into the grey and get flagged as a result, but I'm out. Constructive debate requires a shared reality and set of facts.
There's nothing wrong with being Person 1. But it's foolish, at best, to keep confusing Person 1 with Person 2. You're willing to commit to that insanity. I am not.
Aggressive? When did stating the obvious become aggressive?
or to make profit. Being acquired used to mean you failed, and had to suck your pride in and let someone else buy you out to pay off your debts.
And in my feeling, I've seen PE getting more active in tech last year (maybe just because valuations went down).
If there was no options in that niche, the market objectively would be a lot tougher.
If the business model is to be acquired that will require the business model to change, I'd prefer that than a bunch of companies only working to be acquired, fucking customers in the process (and all of the externalities deriving from that, like wasted man-hours to move away from products that will be killed).
I don't have any numbers and probably more than 50% do fail, but not 90%. Plenty of bakers, restaurants, accountants and small shops succeed in making money for the owners, employment for the staff and value for the customers.
Good. Agreements should as much as possible be free between consenting parties. It shouldn't be normal to expect the government to be involved in approving things except where there's a great reason to need it.
The problem with this ideology is that will destroy society and reduce it to ashes.
> It shouldn't be normal to expect the government to be involved in approving things except where there's a great reason to need it.
If you think preventing company towns isn't a great reason to need approval, fair enough, but then why are you saying company towns are bad?
And if a town is dependent on one major employee should we do what exactly?
Where is here?
I'm really struggling to understand why you're asking questions tartly instead of just reading what I said, which I tried to make very simple to understand, and replying just as simply.
You said the government shouldn't involve itself "unless there's a great reason to do so," which I interpret as implying you disagree with the reasons. Do you think anti-trust measures are a great reason?
Step 1: Adobe buys Figma
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.
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Step n: Adobe takes over a small town and forces people to make websites?
Please tell me how the government’s actions has stopped that conclusion.
Admittedly these are the people getting the lions share of VC money in the first place though.
The entire purpose of starting a company is to make a profit by delivering a product or service that the market will willingly buy. The operative word there is "profit" -- something that seems to have going conspicuously missing from companies that are being built for the purpose of being "exited".
Why? People can start companies for whatever reason, also your company itself can be the product and big tech companies might be the market you're targeting. Users might just be along for the ride (and they get cheaper and/or better products because VCs are willing to subsidize their development).
Certainly not in terms of expectation value. Most of the value of a startup at any given funding round is driven by the possibility of a public listing. This is true even though most successful startup outcomes are acquisitions.
> Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public.
The correct number is 18, not 5. [1]
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation (select the "Public" tab.)
The best I could find is that YC has invested in 4000 companies..
https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/valuation
I imagine this claim is satire, given how outlandish it is. But if I were to take it at face value for a second... Acquired by whom? Other companies... Who were started to... Get acquired themselves? Where did these other companies get the money to begin with? Etc. This is just a stupendously ridiculous take, I just cannot consider it was made in good faith.
> Of the literally hundreds of companies that YC has invested in, only 5 have gone public.
YC is a droplet in the ocean of the economy. Even if we just look at the US, about five million businesses were started in 2022 alone. https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html
No way. Slacktivism is a pejorative for a reason. Compared to an upvote or a comment on [social media platform], a call or physical letter will have between 10 and 10,000 times the impact on your targeted public servant.
Getting media attention is a long shot.
I asked the original question. I was hoping for a “here’s a list of people you can email or call or write to” resource.
Social media is better than nothing, but it would be a lot more impactful to go the extra distance to make sure it lands somewhere people are already looking.
I just wish I knew where that somewhere was.
Even my local corner store merging with a corner store in the next town over is bad for suppliers (combined negotiations when buying stock), and bad for consumers (prices set the same between the two towns).
I wonder what a world where company mergers were banned would look like?
With your example, the local stores could have joined forces to compete against their bigger competitor: the supermarket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Institutions_Deregu...
Joint-ventures might also be a postive. I can think of ARM, and the alignment in the automotive industry to standardise parts and platforms to lower total costs.
In the mainstream economist view, mergers are generally good, both for the companies and society. If they don't produce some efficiency surplus, there is no reason for the companies to do them.
If instead of Adobe buying Figma, it was Adobe's biggest competitor, that would probably increase competition by making that company a more viable competitor to Adobe.
Every time a company merges, say 10% of the combined value of the new company is given to the government (perhaps with a discount if one or other of the merging companies has recently paid the merger tax).
The lack of the 10% fee for a company who didn't merge is effectively compensation for the fact it has less market control than peers in the same market who did merge.
Mergers are not the only way in which market concentration happens though. You can't ban asset sales and you can't ban companies from hiring employees of weaker or defunct competitors.
If the owners of Figma decided that Figma wasn't viable as a standalone company, they could sell the software and fire all employees so they could be re-hired by whoever bought the software. No regulator in the world would mandate the software to be destroyed and the employees exiled.
Also, I don't think a market without mergers and acquisitions would necessarily be very competitive. It could well trend towards an equilibrium where a few big incumbants would rule their respective turfs unchallenged and a large number of tiny companies without the capital to do anything big.
I think merging legal entities is just a more efficient, less messy way of handling asset sales.
If you look at stats, it's about a 50-50 split in appointments between right vs. left.
My general rule of thumb is that unless the company is putting you in a position where you actually get to drive, stock should be treated only as icing on the cake of an already worth while salary. (Unless it's a publicly traded company where you can reasonably assert that stock price will most likely go up or stay around the same)
Hopefully future us won’t look back at this deal as the beginning of a weak M&A market
Severely limiting the ability to be acquired reduces the incentives for new founders as well as investors in new companies if the only realistic path is waiting for them to go public. Especially since being acquired doesn't require you to be in nearly as good a financial position in terms of profit as going public does.
It’s a bit like asking in 2009 if the secondary mortgage market is a valuable market worth having. It provides significant good (IMO) to support real estate transactions.
But, I don't think that YouTube or Instagram are an inherent moral requirement for society, so I don't think it's the end of the world if they never existed.
Try to sell to the buyer who would maximize the return to company [shareholders]; when that falls through, take whatever the next best path for them is.
Prices will creep up, product segmentation will be introduced, pop-ups pushing expensive service add-ons will eventually appear. And when the revenue number is pumped enough, it goes public or is sold to private equity which has no trouble with antitrust regulators.
Have you used Figma lately? All of those things have been happening for years with Figma, even before rumors about the Adobe purchase appeared.
But even so, Figma's prices have been increasing, the product is being segmented, they're increasingly pushing for various addons, even if Figma still is cheaper than Adobe.
I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe's decision to phase it out resulted in all these new UI design apps to appear in the market (Sketch, InVision, Figma, etc).
EU and UK and seemingly everyone else is passing laws and setting up bureaucracies specifically to implement unfair trade restrictions and barriers against US companies and they're basically doing it unopposed, you'd think these actions would at least trigger some tariff threats and WTO complains sadly the government is in a self destruct spiral at the moment.
You can't just go after a sector of your trade partner's economy just to compensate for your home sector's deficiencies.
> You can't just go after a sector of your trade partner's economy just to compensate for your home sector's deficiencies.
Is that what the EU is doing, or is it what you yourself think they are doing?
If we do the math, we have to ask - where would those 20 billion dollars come from that were to be paid by Adobe to Figma investors? I'm sure not from Adobe's coffers, their bean counters would place them onto subscription pricing with a time cap to recoup all that cost. For sure.
I would assume that regulators aren't unaware of that in the said markets (UK/Europe) and are not pro investor (few hundreds) rather pro consumers (millions)
What company is making money in this?
It is the investors that poured in 300+ million were going to have a massively inflated payback day, later compensated and loaded on to the backs of unsuspecting end users.
The sign up, and cancelling process of their various services are so "dark design" it's criminal. I've had to wait in a chat window for days to have a service cancelled after signing up for something i clearly didn't sign up for, a yearly payment instead of a monthly with no warning for a very expensive suit, and many are in the same boat almost bankrupting entire small companies.
More and more places does this and they should all banned and their CEO's put in jail because they prey on vulnerable people, steal millions and waste everyone else's time.
I'm not kidding one bit with the jail thing, lines have been crossed so much it's getting ridiculous now, i don't care how rich or powerful you are. This is why we need strict regulation and serious consequences for CEO's and shareholders of straight up criminal companies.
However, I am afraid they will sell to someone else. Namely, Microsoft.
Adobe does not compete with Microsoft in any meaningful way. There is some overlap in some products here or there, but it's not meaningful competition.
Adobe competes with Figma. The fact that Microsoft doesn't compete with Figma is precisely why it's ok for the former to acquire the latter.
If I was Figma, and I had to choose, I would go with Adobe. Adobe would have made Figma a core strategic product and would have made them much more relevant in a space that they deeply care about. Microsoft would never care that much about Figma, because the design/UX space isn't core to Microsoft. Also, Figma is too small for Microsoft to make it a centrepiece of any of their strategic initiatives.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/11/microsoft-looked-at-figma-bu...
It is time to remove electron based app and invest in something that will have a proper memory management. Not only 2gb. My phone has more than this.
You have cornered the market. Now deliver.
Figma is more than this, and the complexity of the workflows requires offline support and more memory available to the app.:)
Currently on an M2 Pro MBP and Figma is more responsive than Affinity Design. The latest versions of Illustrator have had a bunch of GPU rendering issues that affect performance. In fact these issues were the reason I started using Figma.
I just kept the chat window open for 3 hours one afternoon while working, replying every 5 minutes that no, it wasn't acceptable, and I wouldn't pay anything. Slowly they started reducing the amount until they got to 0.
At points they got extremely aggressive, but from reading other people's stories online, that's just part of their training.
I'm not so sure Figma is in a better spot, even with this new cash in hand.
I'd bet cash money that there are at least some for whom the paycheck means they can do their thing and not have to take a day job. These are the sorts of people who create a Figma instead of an enshittification.
The trick is always to get paid something instead of having to get a day job. And I'm sure there are folks who 'have to come into work' and are still doing good and worthy jobs… but man! You figure they are all like that? At Figma, of all places?
Never work in the music business, is all I can say. Or filmmaking. There are entire industries that ride on the ability to wildly underpay talented people just so they can do the things they're excited about doing. Far from 'not promising a huge payout', you can absolutely screw large numbers of people if they get to hear the band play, or get to look through the viewfinder and see the rushes.
$1B would be enough to cover that completely, but as a person who has been in companies that have been acquired. (multiple times), that's not really how it works.
I've never worked anywhere that started working on integrating or unifying roadmaps before the contracts were inked and the deal fully ratified.
Because it's not really legal. I've been a similar situation previously, and we were specifically forbidden from working on any integration projects until the deal closed, as in the legal department gave a company-wide presentation on exactly what kind of work was and wasn't allowed (e.g. obviously execs/legal folks could work towards completing the merger, but working on actual engineering integration was expressly forbidden).
That seems highly unlikely.
Also, they are not working on any Adobe roadmap. Other than a few offsite brainstorm session, no real work has been put into integrating with Adobe.
I just hope Google or Msft doesn't get any funny idea to buy Figma.
What would be the use of starting a business if the government can arbitrarily block it from being acquired?
I understand this happening in Europe but not America.
I think America is going to lag behind in tech entrepreneurship just like Europe and I wonder what the next potential tech entrepreneurship hub will be.
Furthermore, there's something like 20k M&A deals / yr completed in North America alone, the majority that are still life-changing wealth creation events for the founders.
So don't despair - 1 problematic anti-competitive M&A deal blocked by the government does not signal the end of entrepreneurship in the US.
If you're very different, none of the famous investors will like you (that's assuming they even learn about your existence) and your chances in this industry will be very bad.
The reality is that you "become chosen" by building a company that is growing very quickly in a big market. That's it.
Most successful startups didn't wait around for some name-brand VC to pick them (that's the most anti-entrepreneur mindset I can think of). The big funding happens much later than the initial traction and momentum.
Yes, you have to be personable enough to be able to talk to clients, investors, recruit top talent, etc -- but that's not the VC arbitrarily choosing whether they like you or not -- that's a cold reality of being a great founder.
How is that a comforting thought? It's difficult to imagine anything more disturbing. At least if I admitted I was just a failure by my own hand, it would be much easier as I could try to improve myself. It would look like there is a small chance. That would be far more comforting.
Start a business to solve a problem.
If you really build something users like, with a decent market, you will do fine (as will/have the founders of Figma).
If you hope to use getting "acquihired" to get rich even if you fail, then sorry, the world doesn't need more founders like you.
The founder is still the CEO owning a majority of shares and his second and third in command (or their families) hold most of the remaining shares. He's getting close to retirement and probably will do so in a few years passing the torch on to his children.
AFAIK he came from a very upper middle class background but not real wealth and kept the company alive by being profitable (not Tech margins though). That seems to be a quite sustainable business model that made him, his cofounders wealthy enough to not worry about money even we'd close tomorrow.
Nothing wrong with that and certainly something an aspiring entrepreneur could aim for. It's more difficult though and you need to run a tight ship at times and actually think longterm and how to sustain your business.