16 ms·

Figma files for proposed IPO

515 points by kualto 1y ago

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rco8786 1y ago
Congrats to the team here. Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there.
- mettamage 1y ago
  Actually, that's a fair point! Thanks for making it :)
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  this downplays what they've actually built. Their technology is first-mover and incredibly impressive in the enterprise app space, and they've built a big business around it.
  - rco8786 1y ago
    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.
    - latexr 1y ago
      Except it was not a crowded space. They did a bunch of stuff no one else was (or is) doing right from the start. Being entirely in the browser, real-time collaboration, vector networks…
      - virgilp 1y ago
        You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough. That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        latexr 1y ago
        > You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough. I mean, you’re technically correct¹ but that’s not exactly helpful because the inverse is also true: You can define any space as “crowded” if you widen it enough. That is to say it is perfectly plausible I am wrong and the space was crowded, but that argument doesn’t really prove or disprove it. > That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering. Especially if you allow someone in the space to redefine it. At that point all bets are off and anyone can claim anything. ¹ The best kind of correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
      - rco8786 1y ago
        You are confusing technology for product. The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose from (including ones in browser with real time collab and other interesting tech). Figma entered that market later and won on a combination of technology and product innovation aka execution. But they absolutely entered a crowded market.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there. I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the vast majority of software developers don't have and never will have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development. And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.
  - seanclayton 1y ago
    > The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development. Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.
    - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
      That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free" take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work. Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of competitive products (which was the point of the comment I was responding to), clients have plenty of other options. They chose and continue to choose Figma because they believe it gives them value over other possibilities.
  - vikramkr 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of other things
  - 1y ago
- robenkleene 1y ago
  The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...): > In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web. It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.
Manik_agg 1y ago
Figma has come a long way, from a blocked Adobe acquisition to now filing for an IPO.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I see this play out a lot in my country’s stock market. Where numbers are fine and all hunky dory. But in reality all increase in share prices — those meteoric rises has already happened behind the curtain which separates it from the public (and for good). And then IPO comes and the public mostly oays for the final exit. Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?
temptemptemp111 1y ago
[dead]
habosa 1y ago
So much negativity in this thread. I thought we’d be able to celebrate this one. Figma provided an alternative to the evil Adobe empire that was actually better. It’s powered by some amazing tech built originally by one of the founders. It’s still got a generous free plan. I’m happy the employees will get to cash out.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  I like Figma. My disappointment is that I know it's a transient tool. I grew up learning Photoshop, a tool which I now never use because it is expensive and neutered. And Sony Vegas, which is also expensive and pointless when free alternatives do the same thing. And now I can add Figma to the list of tools I learned but will likely never touch for even a free project. Which makes me sad! I like it. This business model isn't sustainable for individuals, so they're going to naturally be upset. If the B2B market is more lucrative for Figma then they have every right to optimize for it, but they're going to pay the cost in user goodwill. Many startups go through this process.
- max_ 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lompad 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    I take uber every day and haven't found it to be "enshittified" (outside of some ads appearing in the app now).
us0r 1y ago
> The table above does not reflect our renewed cloud hosting agreement with a third-party provider, entered into on May 31, 2025. Under the terms of the non-cancellable agreement, we committed to purchase a minimum of $545.0 million in cloud hosting services over the next five years. This renewed agreement replaces a previous agreement with the provider. $300k/DAY AWS bill. I wonder what the "non-cancellable" savings is.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  Figma earns more profit for AWS than it could earn for itself firing everyone.
- taminka 1y ago
  why is it so high? all of their high performance stuff is on device wasm, so all of that just to host their website and like collab features or some such?
  - rudi-c 1y ago
    There's plenty of server-side components to Figma that are substantially more complex and expensive than that of the typical website. Multiplayer means that every file that are user loads is loaded onto a compute server and retained in-memory on that server, processing every mutation to the document. Figma documents can get quite large -- they can contain the design system of an entire organization, dozens of variations of a product feature, etc. This means the server cost scales per active session at a given time, a higher "number" than active requests. In addition to multiplayer, Figma attempts to keep most other parts of the application real-time. If another user adds a file to a project, you will see it without refreshing the page. That's a simple example, but certain types of queries/mutation can get much more complex. Figma is an enterprise app, and the data models needed to support complex use cases (permissions, etc) means that DB load is a real challenge. While the DAU count of Figma might not be as high as other consumer apps, the amount of time those users spend in Figma is often substantially higher. Those are some of the things that contribute to a high bill. While Figma is most known for the frontend editor, the infra work is plenty interesting too.
nout 1y ago
More and more companies are now holding bitcoin in their treasuries (including Figma according to the filling). It's interesting, but it makes a lot of sense.
- v5v3 1y ago
  Why does it make sense? When the price is so volatile. If the companies are so confident of their trading ability then they should stop their existing business and become trading companies.
  - andirk 1y ago
    I see it as more of a hedge. Put 1% into the counterpoint to the rest of your portfolio. I'm personally heavily invested in crypto so I make sure to hold traditional stonks as kind of a hedge against all this space cash crashing to ground. At this point though, crypto are basically ETFs so it's all one big pie now.
- __loam 1y ago
  It's pretty weird that a lot of the business leadership in tech is earnestly invested in a recreation of the free banking era actually.
b0a04gl 1y ago
[dead]
once_inc 1y ago
[flagged]
- maelito 1y ago
  Yes and I thought "eat your own dog food, good idea" even if Figma is a nightmare for me to use at work.
Alex_L_Wood 1y ago
Maybe this will finally cause designers to ditch Figma. It's a fantastic tool for designers, but it's complete shit for developers.
h1fra 1y ago
Congrats Figma! It annoys me every time I open their UI, billions of dollars in revenue for a web design tool, yet still no way to export tokens natively as CSS.
hyperbolablabla 1y ago
It's funny its performance is touted as its biggest selling point, I find it to be painfully slow
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dgb23 1y ago
  Compared to what?
rglullis 1y ago
A bit off-topic, but I really wish we had a system where we could make bets to pit public companies that develop closed source software against its FOSS alternatives. In the example here: people would bet by either buying $100 worth of Figma shares, or they could buy $50 worth of put options and give $50 to the developers of Penpot. Would something like that be legal or does it violate any type of trading regulations?
- dkdcio 1y ago
  it’s only illegal if you start beating the rich I would love to be a reverse—VC
  - rglullis 1y ago
    This is one of the many things where I have a good chunk of the backend code already written but couldn't find the time or urgency to work on an MVP. Should I make a mock system, see how many people would be willing to sign up and make a pledge to their favorite projects?
- raincole 1y ago
  But people can already buy $100 of Figma shares (upon its IPO). Why would people who want to buy Figma share use your hypothetical platform?
  - rglullis 1y ago
    My idea is more about a system that can track and mediate support for the pro-FOSS than anything. For the pro-commercial side of the bet, showing ownership of the shares would be enough I guess.
- simonsarris 1y ago
  Don't we have that system? Post IPO you can absolutely buy puts on FIG while donating to Penpot. (I do not recommend this)
  - 1y ago
Brajeshwar 1y ago
I read that as though new companies filing IPO should use files created with Figma.
dcchuck 1y ago
Congratulations to the Figma team! Well earned. It was such an exciting product when it hit the scene. It became the standard so fast, and it was easy to see why. When there were talks of them being bought for $20 billion I thought it was a great deal for Adobe - and that was before seeing these impressive financials. I will admit I have waned enthusiasm a on Figma over the past couple of years. I find the UI churn confusing. The new features, i.e. dev mode and variables, feel out of place. I find the plugin ecosystem cumbersome. Doing simple things has become complex. I'm putting out real "who moved my cheese?" energy here I know. I suppose I'm wondering if others feel the same.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Others do, and an IPO and the resultant financial pressure means we’ll be looking for a different platform to migrate to. Products simply never get better at this point from a customer’s perspective.
  - jacob_rezi 1y ago
    It seems so risk adverse right? I couldnt imagine telling my team to explore a new way to design as a result of the coming IPO
  - avgDev 1y ago
    This is tale as old as time honestly. Create a product sell or IPO. Revenue pressure increases. Product cost is increased or staff is cut. New software takes crown. Rinse and repeat.
- whymsicalburito 1y ago
  I'm a little surprised by this comment because both dev mode and variables are the main ways I use Figma. Our design team creates the design and then the Devs use dev mode to implement what they designed. Dev mode has been great for our team! Is this an uncommon use case?
- soseng 1y ago
  As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and fast for us non-design focused devs
VoodooJuJu 1y ago
[dead]
newcommiedeal 1y ago
[flagged]
methods21 1y ago
Lets see how far from the $20billion offer they IPO at.
pm90 1y ago
From the adobe disaster to this. I am glad Adobe didn’t snuff them out. Cheers and congrats to … fig-mates? : )
- rib3ye 1y ago
  They did collect a $1B kill fee.
- zombot 1y ago
  Let's hope it's not the start of enshittification.
pixxel 1y ago
If you’re tired of it all, and the inevitable, and you have agency, try penpot.app
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rglover 1y ago
  Also Sketch [1]. Everyone abandoned it when Figma became the pOpUlAr tool, but I still use it every day, nearly 15 years later and it's continued to improve. [1] https://sketch.com https://sketch.com
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    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.
  - aegypti 1y ago
    Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zX41ZdbW 1y ago
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
giacaglia 1y ago
Its S-1 shows $70M held in Bitcoin ETFs, and board approval for another $30M BTC purchase via USDC! https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454 https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454
- boredatoms 1y ago
  Thats pretty weird, you’d think they would offload things like that to not spook investors
  - rib3ye 1y ago
    It says more about Bitcoin than it does Figma.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > they would offload things like that to not spook investors Judging by the amount of fairly traditional companies holding Bitcoins, it would seem like holding Bitcoin is no longer spooky. I guess it makes sense when the financial environment is slowly turning into one without any regulations, Bitcoin will thrive in that sort of market.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- cluckindan 1y ago
  Oh, so that’s why they’re taking it public: they are turning the company into a crypto investment fund which just happens to provide a SaaS design tool.
  - drexlspivey 1y ago
    It’s the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because they are going public for the meme stock value.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
btown 1y ago
They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends. https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes: > [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser. The document representation and canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++ development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide a better debugging environment. > Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity. > [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and stability. It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.
- hiphipjorge 1y ago
  As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, 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.
system2 1y ago
When they go IPO, will you guys buy it immediately, expecting it to go up? Curious what people think about the figma's future.
- diegof79 1y ago
  Point of view as a Figma user... With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period. Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall). What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team. The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight integration with Figma could help them leverage their current subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers. Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting market. The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing, which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited. The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools, they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma. Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.
lenerdenator 1y ago
Looks like I got access to it riiiiiiiight as they're gonna start gutting themselves to pay for retirement and pension funds. Awesome!
colesantiago 1y ago
So now that Figma will be owned by Wall Street, it will only get considerably worse from here. It is now time consider and find and fund open source alternatives. I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?
- cluckindan 1y ago
  I agree. If they’re so profitable already, why take the company public at all?
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    to be a lot more profitable
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      And how would that happen? They already have the product, which can be sold in huge numbers without really needing to scale operations. Are you suggesting they need cash to rewrite or improve the product?
  - CSMastermind 1y ago
    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.
    - j7ake 1y ago
      Sounds like asking for the public to buy them out .
- atombender 1y ago
  At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features are just as good, and sometimes better. They have a decent desktop Electron app that wraps it, too.
rvz 1y ago
Very predictable outcome: [0] [1] Now prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of people looking for Figma alternatives. The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the public markets on retail. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533826 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920968
jonator 1y ago
Reminds me of the Linear story. You can disrupt a set of established players by focusing on simplicity, opinionated design, and maximum performance via hardcore engineering.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
StableAlkyne 1y ago
Going public is usually terrible news for users. That said, today it's an incredibly good design tool - worth checking out before shareholders start the enshittification process. Congrats to the devs / founders for making it all the way to an IPO!
ElevenLathe 1y ago
[flagged]
- Zealotux 1y ago
  Figma's enshittification started back when there were talks of Adobe taking over, it's already bloated beyond reason.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS. But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.
  - dawnerd 1y ago
    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...
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  Beyond Penpot and Excalidraw, check out Sketch (Mac-only but mature), Lunacy (offline-capable), and Plasmic (code-focused) - all with different trade-offs but less pressure to monetize aggressively.
granzymes 1y ago
Headline financials: FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage | 2023 | 2024 | YoY ---------------|--------|--------|------- revenue | $505 | $749 | 48% gross profit | $460 | $661 | 44% op ex | $534 | $1,539 | 118% net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)% free cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)%
- VoidWhisperer 1y ago
  What happened in 2024 that caused their operating expenses to increase so much?
  - v5v3 1y ago
    If they were planning to IPO, they will have put in place a strategy to maximise the numbers for the year prior. So the numbers for the year before IPO may have no relation to future.
  - granzymes 1y ago
    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%
    - 1y ago
Animats 1y ago
There's a president-for-life clause: "Immediately following the completion of this offering, and assuming no exercise of the underwriters’ over-allotment option, Dylan Field, our Chair of our Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, and President will hold or have the ability to control approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, including % of the voting power pursuant to the Wallace Proxy. As a result, following this offering, Mr. Field will have the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of our directors and the approval of any change of control transaction."
- LtdJorge 1y ago
  This is what they call "a W"
- mattmaroon 1y ago
  That generally makes me more inclined to invest as I find that the biggest problem with a lot of public companies is they manage to Wall Street which means putting the short term over the long term, and those are often at odds with each other.
  - skeeter2020 1y ago
    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.
    - mattmaroon 1y ago
      It’s not really punishment if you don’t care what your share price is. A lower share price doesn’t hurt a company unless perhaps they are trying to do a secondary offering or something. It does, however, hurt the Wall Street investors. If they have enough power to do so, they will replace the CEO if a share price is too low for too long. That’s what creates the short term incentive that is a trouble and a lot of public companies. If the CEO has control of the voting shares, that pressure is relieved.
Kye 1y ago
What Figma did in this era of anticompetitive buyouts is admirable but my mind will always think figma balls even after they IPO freely. Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Figma and good luck.
urda 1y ago
Don't forget how Figma bullied Loveable from being able to use "dev mode" [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-desist-letter-to-lovable-over-the-term-dev-mode/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-des...
- rib3ye 1y ago
  Don't forget how Loveable used the moment as an acquisition tactic, which was probably the whole point.
  - urda 1y ago
    That’s one way to frame it, but it’s missing the power imbalance. Loveable was the smaller party here, Figma suddenly turned hostile when their success overlapped with a feature Figma hadn’t monetized yet. “Used the moment” sounds a lot like surviving a punch and then asking for help. If you think that’s scheming, maybe revisit who threw the first punch.
- designerarvid 1y ago
  That’s how trademark works. You lose it if you have it and don’t protect it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sephr 1y ago
    I think the point the parent comment is making is that companies shouldn't be able to trademark common phrases with their usual spelling. 'Dev mode' is a common short form for 'developer mode' which has extensive use.
    - jonatron 1y ago
      I wrote a little about it, because it's more complicated than "a trademark": https://jonatron.github.io/randomstuff/trademark/fig.html https://jonatron.github.io/randomstuff/trademark/fig.html
lvl155 1y ago
Figma is an incredible product but I don’t like what they’re doing with AI. They should focus on enabling UI/UX designers to do more instead of making a glorified Dreamweaver.
- ojosilva 1y ago
  So, this is a cash out before AI or AI-first solutions out do Figma? Seriously, are people starting to replace Figma with just basic LLM or simpler LLM-based solutions? I'm just trying to understand the timing of the IPO and the market. We used to use Figma, but dropped it as first phases of product design loop ended. Basic LLM does not feel there yet, but it does feel like it could be there very quickly.
greatgib 1y ago
To me, an IPO by them at this moment let me think that they know that they are on top of the wave and that it is better to cash-in before growth starts to stale. They got a huge influx of users when image editing AI started to be a thing, I'm not quite sure that they haven't already conquered most of new users that could join them.
- pm90 1y ago
  Could be. It also could be that they feel comfortable raising money in the public markets for expansion, and to reward/retain their organization. We don’t really know if they tried doing a databricks or a stripe and raise billions in the private market, maybe they did, maybe they found there’s more upside in an IPO…
andybak 1y ago
And the cycle continues. Who's working on the "Figma but not enshittified" at the moment?
- Lalabadie 1y ago
  Penpot is the most solid alternative I know of at the moment.
  - esskay 1y ago
    And can be self hosted which is a massive plus!
  - diggan 1y ago
    With the biggest differentiator being that in Penpot, everything is a SVG/Open Standards, which for us web folks is a neat addition. Also developed by a local company in Spain, go Spain! And for the nerds, it's open source and built using ClojureScript :)
- rco8786 1y ago
  Honestly the cycle continuing is a breath of fresh air relative to the AI-ification of our entire industry.

515 points by kualto 1y ago

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rco8786 1y ago

Congrats to the team here. Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there.

mettamage 1y ago
Actually, that's a fair point! Thanks for making it :)
skeeter2020 1y ago
this downplays what they've actually built. Their technology is first-mover and incredibly impressive in the enterprise app space, and they've built a big business around it.
- rco8786 1y ago
  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.
  - latexr 1y ago
    Except it was not a crowded space. They did a bunch of stuff no one else was (or is) doing right from the start. Being entirely in the browser, real-time collaboration, vector networks…
    - virgilp 1y ago
      You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough. That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - latexr 1y ago
        > You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow it down enough. I mean, you’re technically correct¹ but that’s not exactly helpful because the inverse is also true: You can define any space as “crowded” if you widen it enough. That is to say it is perfectly plausible I am wrong and the space was crowded, but that argument doesn’t really prove or disprove it. > That was the point really, they entered a crowded space & re-defined it with their offering. Especially if you allow someone in the space to redefine it. At that point all bets are off and anyone can claim anything. ¹ The best kind of correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
    - rco8786 1y ago
      You are confusing technology for product. The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose from (including ones in browser with real time collab and other interesting tech). Figma entered that market later and won on a combination of technology and product innovation aka execution. But they absolutely entered a crowded market.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
> Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that “their idea has been taken” or “there already solutions for this” out there. I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the vast majority of software developers don't have and never will have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development. And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.
- seanclayton 1y ago
  > The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of software development. Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a success story.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free" take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work. Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of competitive products (which was the point of the comment I was responding to), clients have plenty of other options. They chose and continue to choose Figma because they believe it gives them value over other possibilities.
- vikramkr 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of other things
- 1y ago
robenkleene 1y ago
The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software transitions, here's the relevant section (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions-the-five-year-rule/ https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...): > In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an underappreciated factor in Sketch’s, and by extension, Figma’s, success: That flat design shifted the category of design software from professional creative software to something more akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was first released in 2006. This explains why no other application has been able to follow in Figma’s footsteps by bringing creative software to the web: Figma didn’t blaze a trail for other professional creative software to move to the web, instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become office suite software, a category that was already successful on the web. It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media editing industries for software to go backwards in capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped needing special effects, then of course the entire existing movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.

Manik_agg 1y ago

Figma has come a long way, from a blocked Adobe acquisition to now filing for an IPO.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

I see this play out a lot in my country’s stock market. Where numbers are fine and all hunky dory. But in reality all increase in share prices — those meteoric rises has already happened behind the curtain which separates it from the public (and for good). And then IPO comes and the public mostly oays for the final exit. Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?

temptemptemp111 1y ago

[dead]

habosa 1y ago

So much negativity in this thread. I thought we’d be able to celebrate this one. Figma provided an alternative to the evil Adobe empire that was actually better. It’s powered by some amazing tech built originally by one of the founders. It’s still got a generous free plan. I’m happy the employees will get to cash out.

bigyabai 1y ago
I like Figma. My disappointment is that I know it's a transient tool. I grew up learning Photoshop, a tool which I now never use because it is expensive and neutered. And Sony Vegas, which is also expensive and pointless when free alternatives do the same thing. And now I can add Figma to the list of tools I learned but will likely never touch for even a free project. Which makes me sad! I like it. This business model isn't sustainable for individuals, so they're going to naturally be upset. If the B2B market is more lucrative for Figma then they have every right to optimize for it, but they're going to pay the cost in user goodwill. Many startups go through this process.
max_ 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lompad 1y ago
[flagged]
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  I take uber every day and haven't found it to be "enshittified" (outside of some ads appearing in the app now).

us0r 1y ago

> The table above does not reflect our renewed cloud hosting agreement with a third-party provider, entered into on May 31, 2025. Under the terms of the non-cancellable agreement, we committed to purchase a minimum of $545.0 million in cloud hosting services over the next five years. This renewed agreement replaces a previous agreement with the provider. $300k/DAY AWS bill. I wonder what the "non-cancellable" savings is.

doctorpangloss 1y ago
Figma earns more profit for AWS than it could earn for itself firing everyone.
taminka 1y ago
why is it so high? all of their high performance stuff is on device wasm, so all of that just to host their website and like collab features or some such?
- rudi-c 1y ago
  There's plenty of server-side components to Figma that are substantially more complex and expensive than that of the typical website. Multiplayer means that every file that are user loads is loaded onto a compute server and retained in-memory on that server, processing every mutation to the document. Figma documents can get quite large -- they can contain the design system of an entire organization, dozens of variations of a product feature, etc. This means the server cost scales per active session at a given time, a higher "number" than active requests. In addition to multiplayer, Figma attempts to keep most other parts of the application real-time. If another user adds a file to a project, you will see it without refreshing the page. That's a simple example, but certain types of queries/mutation can get much more complex. Figma is an enterprise app, and the data models needed to support complex use cases (permissions, etc) means that DB load is a real challenge. While the DAU count of Figma might not be as high as other consumer apps, the amount of time those users spend in Figma is often substantially higher. Those are some of the things that contribute to a high bill. While Figma is most known for the frontend editor, the infra work is plenty interesting too.

nout 1y ago

More and more companies are now holding bitcoin in their treasuries (including Figma according to the filling). It's interesting, but it makes a lot of sense.

v5v3 1y ago
Why does it make sense? When the price is so volatile. If the companies are so confident of their trading ability then they should stop their existing business and become trading companies.
- andirk 1y ago
  I see it as more of a hedge. Put 1% into the counterpoint to the rest of your portfolio. I'm personally heavily invested in crypto so I make sure to hold traditional stonks as kind of a hedge against all this space cash crashing to ground. At this point though, crypto are basically ETFs so it's all one big pie now.
__loam 1y ago
It's pretty weird that a lot of the business leadership in tech is earnestly invested in a recreation of the free banking era actually.

b0a04gl 1y ago

[dead]

once_inc 1y ago

[flagged]

maelito 1y ago
Yes and I thought "eat your own dog food, good idea" even if Figma is a nightmare for me to use at work.

Alex_L_Wood 1y ago

Maybe this will finally cause designers to ditch Figma. It's a fantastic tool for designers, but it's complete shit for developers.

h1fra 1y ago

Congrats Figma! It annoys me every time I open their UI, billions of dollars in revenue for a web design tool, yet still no way to export tokens natively as CSS.

hyperbolablabla 1y ago

It's funny its performance is touted as its biggest selling point, I find it to be painfully slow

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dgb23 1y ago
Compared to what?

rglullis 1y ago

A bit off-topic, but I really wish we had a system where we could make bets to pit public companies that develop closed source software against its FOSS alternatives. In the example here: people would bet by either buying $100 worth of Figma shares, or they could buy $50 worth of put options and give $50 to the developers of Penpot. Would something like that be legal or does it violate any type of trading regulations?

dkdcio 1y ago
it’s only illegal if you start beating the rich I would love to be a reverse—VC
- rglullis 1y ago
  This is one of the many things where I have a good chunk of the backend code already written but couldn't find the time or urgency to work on an MVP. Should I make a mock system, see how many people would be willing to sign up and make a pledge to their favorite projects?
raincole 1y ago
But people can already buy $100 of Figma shares (upon its IPO). Why would people who want to buy Figma share use your hypothetical platform?
- rglullis 1y ago
  My idea is more about a system that can track and mediate support for the pro-FOSS than anything. For the pro-commercial side of the bet, showing ownership of the shares would be enough I guess.
simonsarris 1y ago
Don't we have that system? Post IPO you can absolutely buy puts on FIG while donating to Penpot. (I do not recommend this)
- 1y ago

Brajeshwar 1y ago

I read that as though new companies filing IPO should use files created with Figma.

dcchuck 1y ago

Congratulations to the Figma team! Well earned. It was such an exciting product when it hit the scene. It became the standard so fast, and it was easy to see why. When there were talks of them being bought for $20 billion I thought it was a great deal for Adobe - and that was before seeing these impressive financials. I will admit I have waned enthusiasm a on Figma over the past couple of years. I find the UI churn confusing. The new features, i.e. dev mode and variables, feel out of place. I find the plugin ecosystem cumbersome. Doing simple things has become complex. I'm putting out real "who moved my cheese?" energy here I know. I suppose I'm wondering if others feel the same.

trollbridge 1y ago
Others do, and an IPO and the resultant financial pressure means we’ll be looking for a different platform to migrate to. Products simply never get better at this point from a customer’s perspective.
- jacob_rezi 1y ago
  It seems so risk adverse right? I couldnt imagine telling my team to explore a new way to design as a result of the coming IPO
- avgDev 1y ago
  This is tale as old as time honestly. Create a product sell or IPO. Revenue pressure increases. Product cost is increased or staff is cut. New software takes crown. Rinse and repeat.
whymsicalburito 1y ago
I'm a little surprised by this comment because both dev mode and variables are the main ways I use Figma. Our design team creates the design and then the Devs use dev mode to implement what they designed. Dev mode has been great for our team! Is this an uncommon use case?
soseng 1y ago
As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and fast for us non-design focused devs

VoodooJuJu 1y ago

[dead]

newcommiedeal 1y ago

[flagged]

methods21 1y ago

Lets see how far from the $20billion offer they IPO at.

pm90 1y ago

From the adobe disaster to this. I am glad Adobe didn’t snuff them out. Cheers and congrats to … fig-mates? : )

rib3ye 1y ago
They did collect a $1B kill fee.
zombot 1y ago
Let's hope it's not the start of enshittification.

pixxel 1y ago

If you’re tired of it all, and the inevitable, and you have agency, try penpot.app

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rglover 1y ago
Also Sketch [1]. Everyone abandoned it when Figma became the pOpUlAr tool, but I still use it every day, nearly 15 years later and it's continued to improve. [1] https://sketch.com https://sketch.com
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  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.
- aegypti 1y ago
  Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zX41ZdbW 1y ago

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...

giacaglia 1y ago

Its S-1 shows $70M held in Bitcoin ETFs, and board approval for another $30M BTC purchase via USDC! https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454 https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454

boredatoms 1y ago
Thats pretty weird, you’d think they would offload things like that to not spook investors
- rib3ye 1y ago
  It says more about Bitcoin than it does Figma.
- diggan 1y ago
  > they would offload things like that to not spook investors Judging by the amount of fairly traditional companies holding Bitcoins, it would seem like holding Bitcoin is no longer spooky. I guess it makes sense when the financial environment is slowly turning into one without any regulations, Bitcoin will thrive in that sort of market.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cluckindan 1y ago
Oh, so that’s why they’re taking it public: they are turning the company into a crypto investment fund which just happens to provide a SaaS design tool.
- drexlspivey 1y ago
  It’s the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because they are going public for the meme stock value.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

btown 1y ago

They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their announcement, but it's publicly available at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025033742/figma-sx1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025... Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin. It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends. https://madebyevan.com/figma/ https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes: > [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser. The document representation and canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++ development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide a better debugging environment. > Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high visual fidelity. > [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and stability. It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.

hiphipjorge 1y ago
As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day. One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we use internally to render font glyphs, 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.

system2 1y ago

When they go IPO, will you guys buy it immediately, expecting it to go up? Curious what people think about the figma's future.

diegof79 1y ago
Point of view as a Figma user... With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period. Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall). What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team. The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight integration with Figma could help them leverage their current subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers. Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting market. The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing, which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited. The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools, they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma. Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.

lenerdenator 1y ago

Looks like I got access to it riiiiiiiight as they're gonna start gutting themselves to pay for retirement and pension funds. Awesome!

colesantiago 1y ago

So now that Figma will be owned by Wall Street, it will only get considerably worse from here. It is now time consider and find and fund open source alternatives. I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?

cluckindan 1y ago
I agree. If they’re so profitable already, why take the company public at all?
- bdangubic 1y ago
  to be a lot more profitable
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    And how would that happen? They already have the product, which can be sold in huge numbers without really needing to scale operations. Are you suggesting they need cash to rewrite or improve the product?
- CSMastermind 1y ago
  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.
  - j7ake 1y ago
    Sounds like asking for the public to buy them out .
atombender 1y ago
At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features are just as good, and sometimes better. They have a decent desktop Electron app that wraps it, too.

rvz 1y ago

Very predictable outcome: [0] [1] Now prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of people looking for Figma alternatives. The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the public markets on retail. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533826 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920968

jonator 1y ago

Reminds me of the Linear story. You can disrupt a set of established players by focusing on simplicity, opinionated design, and maximum performance via hardcore engineering.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

StableAlkyne 1y ago

Going public is usually terrible news for users. That said, today it's an incredibly good design tool - worth checking out before shareholders start the enshittification process. Congrats to the devs / founders for making it all the way to an IPO!

ElevenLathe 1y ago

[flagged]

Zealotux 1y ago
Figma's enshittification started back when there were talks of Adobe taking over, it's already bloated beyond reason.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS. But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.
- dawnerd 1y ago
  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...
ethan_smith 1y ago
Beyond Penpot and Excalidraw, check out Sketch (Mac-only but mature), Lunacy (offline-capable), and Plasmic (code-focused) - all with different trade-offs but less pressure to monetize aggressively.

granzymes 1y ago

Headline financials: FY Ended December 31, in millions except percentage | 2023 | 2024 | YoY ---------------|--------|--------|------- revenue | $505 | $749 | 48% gross profit | $460 | $661 | 44% op ex | $534 | $1,539 | 118% net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)% free cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)%

VoidWhisperer 1y ago
What happened in 2024 that caused their operating expenses to increase so much?
- v5v3 1y ago
  If they were planning to IPO, they will have put in place a strategy to maximise the numbers for the year prior. So the numbers for the year before IPO may have no relation to future.
- granzymes 1y ago
  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%
  - 1y ago

Animats 1y ago

There's a president-for-life clause: "Immediately following the completion of this offering, and assuming no exercise of the underwriters’ over-allotment option, Dylan Field, our Chair of our Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer, and President will hold or have the ability to control approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, including % of the voting power pursuant to the Wallace Proxy. As a result, following this offering, Mr. Field will have the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of our directors and the approval of any change of control transaction."

LtdJorge 1y ago
This is what they call "a W"
mattmaroon 1y ago
That generally makes me more inclined to invest as I find that the biggest problem with a lot of public companies is they manage to Wall Street which means putting the short term over the long term, and those are often at odds with each other.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  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.
  - mattmaroon 1y ago
    It’s not really punishment if you don’t care what your share price is. A lower share price doesn’t hurt a company unless perhaps they are trying to do a secondary offering or something. It does, however, hurt the Wall Street investors. If they have enough power to do so, they will replace the CEO if a share price is too low for too long. That’s what creates the short term incentive that is a trouble and a lot of public companies. If the CEO has control of the voting shares, that pressure is relieved.

Kye 1y ago

What Figma did in this era of anticompetitive buyouts is admirable but my mind will always think figma balls even after they IPO freely. Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Figma and good luck.

urda 1y ago

Don't forget how Figma bullied Loveable from being able to use "dev mode" [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-desist-letter-to-lovable-over-the-term-dev-mode/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-des...

rib3ye 1y ago
Don't forget how Loveable used the moment as an acquisition tactic, which was probably the whole point.
- urda 1y ago
  That’s one way to frame it, but it’s missing the power imbalance. Loveable was the smaller party here, Figma suddenly turned hostile when their success overlapped with a feature Figma hadn’t monetized yet. “Used the moment” sounds a lot like surviving a punch and then asking for help. If you think that’s scheming, maybe revisit who threw the first punch.
designerarvid 1y ago
That’s how trademark works. You lose it if you have it and don’t protect it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Sephr 1y ago
  I think the point the parent comment is making is that companies shouldn't be able to trademark common phrases with their usual spelling. 'Dev mode' is a common short form for 'developer mode' which has extensive use.
  - jonatron 1y ago
    I wrote a little about it, because it's more complicated than "a trademark": https://jonatron.github.io/randomstuff/trademark/fig.html https://jonatron.github.io/randomstuff/trademark/fig.html

lvl155 1y ago

Figma is an incredible product but I don’t like what they’re doing with AI. They should focus on enabling UI/UX designers to do more instead of making a glorified Dreamweaver.

ojosilva 1y ago
So, this is a cash out before AI or AI-first solutions out do Figma? Seriously, are people starting to replace Figma with just basic LLM or simpler LLM-based solutions? I'm just trying to understand the timing of the IPO and the market. We used to use Figma, but dropped it as first phases of product design loop ended. Basic LLM does not feel there yet, but it does feel like it could be there very quickly.

greatgib 1y ago

To me, an IPO by them at this moment let me think that they know that they are on top of the wave and that it is better to cash-in before growth starts to stale. They got a huge influx of users when image editing AI started to be a thing, I'm not quite sure that they haven't already conquered most of new users that could join them.

pm90 1y ago
Could be. It also could be that they feel comfortable raising money in the public markets for expansion, and to reward/retain their organization. We don’t really know if they tried doing a databricks or a stripe and raise billions in the private market, maybe they did, maybe they found there’s more upside in an IPO…

andybak 1y ago

And the cycle continues. Who's working on the "Figma but not enshittified" at the moment?

Lalabadie 1y ago
Penpot is the most solid alternative I know of at the moment.
- esskay 1y ago
  And can be self hosted which is a massive plus!
- diggan 1y ago
  With the biggest differentiator being that in Penpot, everything is a SVG/Open Standards, which for us web folks is a neat addition. Also developed by a local company in Spain, go Spain! And for the nerds, it's open source and built using ClojureScript :)
rco8786 1y ago
Honestly the cycle continuing is a breath of fresh air relative to the AI-ification of our entire industry.