Figma files for proposed IPO

  > It wasn’t lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with its usage of Mac OS’s native shape rendering. It’s just that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.

yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity boost for collaborative teams

After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries. No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.

Font rendering is indeed complex, but the anecdote seems to be misleading readers into thinking Evan wrote obscure code.

I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked directly with him on building the plugin API.

One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that could be simple were simple, things that needed complexity did not shy away from it.

While all codebases have early decisions that later get changed, I'd say that largely speaking, Figma's editor codebase was built upon foundations that stood the test of time. This includes choices such as the APIs used to build product code, interact with multiplayer, the balance between using OOP v.s. more functional or JS-like patterns, the balance between writing code in C++/WASM v.s. JS, etc. Many of these choices can be credited to Evan directly or his influence.

Subsequent engineers that joined were able to build upon the product without causing a spiraling mess of complexity thanks to those good decisions made early on. In my opinion, this is why Figma was able to ship complex new features without being bogged down by exploding tech debt, and a major contributing factor to the business's success as a whole.

I don’t know anything about shaders and this is not personal against Evan, but if someone wrotes code that nobody understands, isn’t it bad thing and not good thing? I thought similarly (admired) many years ago, that those people are wizards and that is cool, but the older I get, less I think so. You often can write the same thing so that it is also easier for others to understand. In most cases, when we talk about compiled languages, compiler optimises it anyway, if you use some extra variables and so on.

I don’t mean this to throw shade, but isn’t the whole point of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.

> which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by it.

yikes

That it works is testimony to the intelligence put towards the code. That no one else can grep it tells me it was solved in a manner which was suboptimal.

I cannot believe Figma hired engineers who could not follow along already-tread footsteps. That’s a nonsensical assertion. Novel code may be inscrutable but the problem-solving and techniques should have been clear and repeatable by those who follow, even if they require adaptation.

I understand where you're coming from and the admiration for someone for whom no problem is seemingly impossible.

I wouldn't glorify "brilliant code" that much though because code should be made to be changed. If it isn't, it's a fragility trait, not a positive trait. Code that no one knows how to change is opportunity lost.

I do understand that it may be hard to create stuff for others when you're alone and going very fast but I don't think praising it is the right idea.

That's... not a screaming testimony, dude.

Hasn't he all but washed his hands of Figma? I have a hard time being interested in something that has such a painful freemium tier, tries to merge with Adobe, and trademarked "Dev Mode".

Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack and designers need to worry less about things they can't control and think more about usability and simplicity.

I work on a large web based application, with designers, who use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma. Something about the balance between the software stack(s), the domain, the focus of designers today, the front end engineering, and product management is broken. It's interesting that Figma did (IMO) a great job at addressing the stack so they can build a product that does what they want it and then is used by so many to build products that don't always do what their customers want. Asking Figma to use the wrong stack for their product (which is what I'm reading between the lines) is not really the right answer...

In my experience that's rarely due to low-level rendering differences, and almost always due to the Figma design not accommodating real-world data.

This, so much this.

I’ve been thinking about a box-first approach to design tooling. The overall layout workflow would consist only of adding boxes (block-level elements) to a blank web page, or inside other boxes. Boxes could also contain other elements like inputs, buttons, images, etc.

Designers complaining that their pixel perfect mockup in any software not aligning with layout in actual browsers is a literal decades old complaint.

I’m in a monthly meetup with designers (not randos, these are typically people who are known in the industry), and half the time is spent shitting on Figma. It’s not necessarily the quality of their design product, it’s the business model and their general focus as a company.

There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM.

Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you can only charge people to use variables for so long before they look for an alternative.

> Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly

Aren't designers mad at Adobe for doing exactly this?

There are a whole lot of companies that are run to benefit their management and not their shareholders. At best, they might be making no money but keeping a bunch of people in work.

There's a good reason public shareholders historically demanded accountability - maybe it's fine for now, but all it takes is some management that you can't kick out, paying themselves extortionate salaries and driving the company into the ground at the same time to recognise the problems with "owning" a company you have no right to actually control (via replacing management and so on)

Short term focus is not a control issue it's a fact of life with public ownership. They still need to manage to market expectations or they will be punished, now one person can do whatever it takes to stay focused on only the next 2 quarters.

That was certainly not my intention. Nothing but respect for what they’ve built. Only pointing out that they entered a crowded space that already had “winners” in it, and succeeded.

Mostly a 356% increase in R&D:

  FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage

                             | 2023 | 2024 | YoY  
  ---------------------------|------|------|------
  research and development   | $165 | $751 | 356%   
  sales and marketing        | $201 | $472 | 134%   
  general and administrative | $168 | $316 | 88%

And most of that increase came from a one-time charge from allowing employees to sell their RSUs. While not a cash cost for Figma, it was booked as an expense and allocated as follows:

                             | 2024   
  ---------------------------|------
  cost of revenue            | $25    
  research and development   | $463   
  sales and marketing        | $187   
  general and administrative | $184   
  total                      | $858   

If you subtract the one-time charge, you get:

                             | 2023 | 2024 (adj.) | YoY  
  ---------------------------|------|-------------|------
  research and development   | $165 | $288        |  75%  
  sales and marketing        | $201 | $285        |  42%  
  general and administrative | $168 | $132        | (21)% 
  total                      | $534 | $705        |  32%

In May 2024, they removed some of the vesting conditions on RSUs so employees could sell shares in a secondary offering.

From an accounting perspective, it was an $800 million stock-based compensation expense, though it didn't really cost Figma anything.

They received a $1B termination fee in 2023 when their acquisition by Adobe collapsed. They would be losing money in 2023 otherwise

Initially Tepid about AI. Didn’t want to upset their base like Adobe was (seemingly) doing. Look at that year’s Figcon for evidence. The keynote led with the new Figma, front loaded anything. He quickly moved past it and spent 90% of the rest of the time on non-consequential features.

Then that AI feature they highlighted was pulled off production because it was cloning iOS.

The AI heavy product dump we just got are lessons from that time.

I find it kind of ridiculous that I need dev mode to get some values that they expose outside of dev mode but in a less dev friendly way. I know there's more to it, but come on...

Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS.

But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.

Because there are likely many employees and investors who want to cash out.

Going public makes their shares liquid. It's (probably) not reasonable for the company to repurchase that equity or to pay employees pure cash comp.

to be a lot more profitable

And can be self hosted which is a massive plus!

It’s the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because they are going public for the meme stock value.

It says more about Bitcoin than it does Figma.

I never switched away from Sketch for personal use. Figma’s collab tools are great, but I find it somewhat clunky for usage beyond prototyping (such as creating image assets).

Figma’s cloud-first nature never also sat well with me… I still have the source PSD files for my earliest works from 25 years ago, which can still be viewed and edited perfectly. Will that be true of my Figma documents in 25 years? It’s not even a question with Sketch.

Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK