9 ms·

It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer

It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead.

DonHopkins 1y ago
But what if you care about Adobe? Booooo Hooooo!!! ;( /s
holmesworcester 1y ago
One way to settle the question of whether Khan is right would be for the government to simply make competing offers in these situations, buy the companies, and shepherd them to IPO, or a buyer with fewer antitrust issues if that's not possible. If the government is net ahead after a decade or so, then we'd know. This approach to antitrust wouldn't work in cases like the Apple case, where the power is worth it to the company only because they can misuse it, but it would be a very fair and accounting-transparent remedy for the "startup gets bought by competitor" case.
- theptip 1y ago
  This is a terrible idea. The government should not be in the business of buying large pre-IPO companies. There is no need to bikeshed a new solution here. Antitrust law solves this just fine, as exemplified by this case.
- benreesman 1y ago
  We've got an awful lot of history on the periods in which serious regulators without perverse incentives attached to revolving door industry jobs competently and diligently refereed markets, and when big business has been successful in achieving what I downthread called "Goldilocks" regulation: just enough friction to new entrants, plenty of pliant former and future employees doing regulation in the interests of the established players. We've got a lot of history on what happens when technology is acknowledged as a natural monopoly and guided through it's development, evolution, and dissemination through society for the global welfare: that's the entire 20th century friend: the transistor, the Internet, the laser, fucking Velcro. We're living through a time when that treasure trove of public wealth (paid for by taxpayers) is getting captured up by a caricature of gilded age kleptocracy at the front row of the fucking Inaugeration. We know what the outcomes are. I don't know why people who hang out on Hacker News are fighting the data on this tooth and nail. Maybe it's because Trump threw her out, maybe it's because they own a bunch of NVIDIA stock and like the status quo, I don't know. The outcomes are not in fucking dispute in this case or the macro situation.
- api 1y ago
  Terrible terrible idea with incredible potential for corruption and theft of public funds.
api 1y ago
There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acquisitions broadly. The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s a victory lap if you’ve won already. Don’t know if this is actually true, that she was having this chilling effect. I am relaying a sentiment I’ve encountered. Of course the other reason is tech-right echo chamber brain rot. People need to get off Xhitter. (Not a fan of doomer left anti tech brain rot either. There’s more than one kind of brain rot around.)
- benreesman 1y ago
  Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though. It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance. Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?
  - api 1y ago
    I agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone. I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
    - benreesman 1y ago
      That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own). Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say. Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.
respondo2134 1y ago
IPOs are a really tough path, and can significantly alter the business. I'd hesitate to hold up the big one for this year as vindication for her entire approach. The vast majority of growth tech companies are not going to go public, but need to release value for investors and employees, and PE or acquisition is the only path open to them. If you've ever had experience with PE you might not want to deal with that, and getting bought is all that's left if you owe people a big return soon.
- benreesman 1y ago
  Sure, and a counter-argument of the form "acquisitions from such valuation to such valuation were down such percent, we interviewed the following founders and these Corp Dev lawyers spoke on the condition of anonymity..." would be an interesting one. But AFAICT at everything but Goliath scale, M&A was actually up over the period. So as usual here we are with the epic showdown of Data and Vibes...and in an obvious landslide Vibes takes it home.
MattDamonSpace 1y ago
It wasn’t the outcome, it was the bad reasoning and the overall desire for interference Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. Khan just needs a poster child for her overall intervention philosophy. Pointing at Figma as a success for her overall world view is like the religious who say “oh god saved me from that flood” while ignoring the hundreds who did die. The Almighty wanted them to die? Or…? If you’re gonna claim the successes you have to claim the failures
- benreesman 1y ago
  What failures? Tech has been Godzilla stomping every conceivable obstacle to total world domination. Its like half the fucking stock market. Someone caught a shooting star in the palm of their hand one time and this happened. What are you talking about?
- nicoburns 1y ago
  > Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
  - pests 1y ago
    Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make. Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually. The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.
dabedee 1y ago
I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through." The FTC wasn't blocking everything, just the deals that would entrench monopolies. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-startups-scaling-and-innovations-in-potential-law-breaking/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...
- benreesman 1y ago
  Yeah I think you're right. It's a sad commentary on the times when a group of people so far above average in caring about outcomes and data just go completely lizard brain in a way that comes out of their own paychecks.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
  - jbothma 1y ago
    Any evidence of that?
    - benreesman 1y ago
      Probably talking about character.ai and a few similar cases. It's not the trend GP is making it out to be.
      - JustExAWS 1y ago
DannyBee 1y ago
Having criticized a lot of her tenure (and still do!), Lina's problem was never whether she was right or not. It's that she was incredibly ineffective. Of course she was right. That's what made her practical ineffectiveness so problematic. She was often 100% right on what should be done but could only achieve 0-10% of it. I'd rather have someone who is 70% right on what should be done, but can achieve almost all of it, as some previous FTC chairs were.
- benreesman 1y ago
  Even this one victory (and it was more than one) is one more than the fucking nothing we're getting on pushback from the SEC to the FDA to the FCC and back again now: this is #CrimeSeason baby (or so its called on Twitter), oligarchs in the front row and all. The last 3 administrations have been soft on FAANG and its going really badly. The argument that she had the correct agenda, won a few, lost most to a captured judiciary (correct me if I'm mis-characterizing your position) is probably the stupidest thing I've seen on one of the dumbest threads in recent memory. Can you clarify where I've lost the plot with your argument and restore some of my sorely tested faith in humanity?
- phillipcarter 1y ago
  Why do you think she was ineffective?
aetherson 1y ago
Suppose that you have an opportunity to play a game. The game is you roll a fair normal six sided die. If it comes up a 6, you get $60B. If it comes up a 5 or 4 you get $30B. If it comes up 3 or less, you get $0. This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you. Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some downside protection. But then someone else says that's not allowed. So you play the game and you roll a six and get $60B. Does that prove the person who made you play it rather than sell it was "right," ex ante?
- dabedee 1y ago
  You raise a valid point about ex ante uncertainty. We can't know future outcomes with certainty, and yes, Figma theoretically could have failed. But antitrust analysis isn't about predicting exact valuations. It's about market structure and competitive dynamics. The FTC had observable facts: Adobe's dominant market share, Figma's rapid growth trajectory, and a purchase price of 50x revenue (extraordinary even for software). These factors suggested Adobe saw Figma as a competitive threat worth eliminating, not just a financial investment. That's the key distinction from your dice game; this wasn't pure randomness but observable market dynamics. You're right that we can't prove the counterfactual. But antitrust law doesn't require certainty, just reasonable probability of competitive harm. The extreme premium Adobe offered was itself evidence they valued removing competition more than acquiring assets. The outcome validates the analysis, but even if Figma had struggled, preserving the possibility of competition has value beyond any single company's success.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    But now you are contradicting your initial argument. Here you say that the price offered by Adobe was astronomically high, and therefore an indicator that the offer was not legitimate, but initially you said that the FTC made the right decision because the offer was 3x lower than the IPO price.
    - lukeschlather 1y ago
missedthecue 1y ago
It doesn't prove it. Khan attempted very fiercely to block Amazon's purchase of iRobot and she, along with the EU authorities, succeeded in preventing it and now iRobot is about to file bankruptcy. We don't have the counterfactual and founders (nor regulatory agencies) can see the future. Someone made a good analogy on twitter that Khan essentially cut off a genius pianist's right hand, the pianist persevered and somehow succeeded in retaining their talent in spite of having one hand, and now Khan is taking credit for the feat. In the same way, the fact that Figma still exists is not proof that she was right.
terminalshort 1y ago
> If you care about market cap? She was right. None of the FTC's business > If you care about employee comp? She was right. None of the FTC's business > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. None of the FTC's business x3 > If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Ok, so this is the FTC's business. But does Figma compete with Adobe in any major areas? I'm not aware of any major Adobe products like that.
- maxbond 1y ago
  > > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. > None of the FTC's business x3 > > If you care about consumer choice, she was right. > Ok, so this is the FTC's business. You don't think there's relationship between consumer choice and a large number of acquirers? These are basically equivalent statements, they're both saying "markets remain competitive".
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Only in the case where both the acquirer and the target have directly competing products, which is why I specifically mentioned that case and said it would be the FTCs business. (And even then sometimes it doesn't. Google bought Waze, which was a direct competitor to Google Maps, but still both products exist.) And, no, they aren't remotely equivalent statements to each other or to "markets remain competitive." If there are 100 products in a market, and an acquisition reduces that to 99, it will have no effect on the competitiveness of a market, which is why such an acquisition is not typically any of the FTC's business.
    - maxbond 1y ago
      No, that's just wrong, if you let Adobe buy up all the design tools then you limit designer's choice to just Adobe. Will they come out with a competing product? Maybe. That's their business. But the potential is there, and Adobe has to stay on its toes and can't coast on it's near-monopoly status. Indeed, it's now also possible Figma will come out with products to compete with Adobe. And just the threat of that has the potential to limit all of the hostile behavior towards consumers Adobe has been up to for years. Which is all to say that the market remains competitive. If you don't think it's the FTC's business to decide whether or not that 100 to 99 move is significant, then I don't think you understand. Even if it's insignificant - it's their business to make that call. You can disagree with it, but if you think that isn't their balliwick, you're simply mistaken.
Dylan16807 1y ago
> The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead. Blocking the merger was good. But I'm not convinced the IPO was good. I think trying to be a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars is only going to make Figma worse. I care about the users more than the people that got rich.
- duped 1y ago
  I mean the bigger problem with the IPO was that they opened at a 20b valuation and by the end of the day a bunch of investors got richer than anyone who built anything because the investment bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies
  - blitzar 1y ago
    > bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies Small float, big hype, litterally designed to pump the stock on the float. 1.2bn was raised - of which only 0.8bn was cashing out existing shareholders - all the other investors got the pump as planned all for the low price of $1.6bn. Basically the existing shareholders got watered down by ~5% and the value of the shares they still hold are 3x and now liquid, better than they got in any of the vc funding rounds.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
The lashing she gets around here is disturbing.
- benreesman 1y ago
  The last time we came down this hard on one of the few diligent, competent, agressive, uncorrupted regulators with a weird mixture of old boys club sexism and tribal spinal reflex gang flag posturing was in 1996 give or take when Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers came after Brooksley Born as the Chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and forced her out via bunch of irregularities and other scandal-worthy maneuver. Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology). If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO. God knows what the price will be this time.

DonHopkins 1y ago

But what if you care about Adobe? Booooo Hooooo!!! ;( /s

holmesworcester 1y ago

One way to settle the question of whether Khan is right would be for the government to simply make competing offers in these situations, buy the companies, and shepherd them to IPO, or a buyer with fewer antitrust issues if that's not possible. If the government is net ahead after a decade or so, then we'd know. This approach to antitrust wouldn't work in cases like the Apple case, where the power is worth it to the company only because they can misuse it, but it would be a very fair and accounting-transparent remedy for the "startup gets bought by competitor" case.

theptip 1y ago
This is a terrible idea. The government should not be in the business of buying large pre-IPO companies. There is no need to bikeshed a new solution here. Antitrust law solves this just fine, as exemplified by this case.
benreesman 1y ago
We've got an awful lot of history on the periods in which serious regulators without perverse incentives attached to revolving door industry jobs competently and diligently refereed markets, and when big business has been successful in achieving what I downthread called "Goldilocks" regulation: just enough friction to new entrants, plenty of pliant former and future employees doing regulation in the interests of the established players. We've got a lot of history on what happens when technology is acknowledged as a natural monopoly and guided through it's development, evolution, and dissemination through society for the global welfare: that's the entire 20th century friend: the transistor, the Internet, the laser, fucking Velcro. We're living through a time when that treasure trove of public wealth (paid for by taxpayers) is getting captured up by a caricature of gilded age kleptocracy at the front row of the fucking Inaugeration. We know what the outcomes are. I don't know why people who hang out on Hacker News are fighting the data on this tooth and nail. Maybe it's because Trump threw her out, maybe it's because they own a bunch of NVIDIA stock and like the status quo, I don't know. The outcomes are not in fucking dispute in this case or the macro situation.
api 1y ago
Terrible terrible idea with incredible potential for corruption and theft of public funds.

api 1y ago

There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acquisitions broadly. The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s a victory lap if you’ve won already. Don’t know if this is actually true, that she was having this chilling effect. I am relaying a sentiment I’ve encountered. Of course the other reason is tech-right echo chamber brain rot. People need to get off Xhitter. (Not a fan of doomer left anti tech brain rot either. There’s more than one kind of brain rot around.)

benreesman 1y ago
Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though. It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance. Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?
- api 1y ago
  I agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone. I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
  - benreesman 1y ago
    That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own). Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say. Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.

respondo2134 1y ago

IPOs are a really tough path, and can significantly alter the business. I'd hesitate to hold up the big one for this year as vindication for her entire approach. The vast majority of growth tech companies are not going to go public, but need to release value for investors and employees, and PE or acquisition is the only path open to them. If you've ever had experience with PE you might not want to deal with that, and getting bought is all that's left if you owe people a big return soon.

benreesman 1y ago
Sure, and a counter-argument of the form "acquisitions from such valuation to such valuation were down such percent, we interviewed the following founders and these Corp Dev lawyers spoke on the condition of anonymity..." would be an interesting one. But AFAICT at everything but Goliath scale, M&A was actually up over the period. So as usual here we are with the epic showdown of Data and Vibes...and in an obvious landslide Vibes takes it home.

MattDamonSpace 1y ago

It wasn’t the outcome, it was the bad reasoning and the overall desire for interference Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. Khan just needs a poster child for her overall intervention philosophy. Pointing at Figma as a success for her overall world view is like the religious who say “oh god saved me from that flood” while ignoring the hundreds who did die. The Almighty wanted them to die? Or…? If you’re gonna claim the successes you have to claim the failures

benreesman 1y ago
What failures? Tech has been Godzilla stomping every conceivable obstacle to total world domination. Its like half the fucking stock market. Someone caught a shooting star in the palm of their hand one time and this happened. What are you talking about?
nicoburns 1y ago
> Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
- pests 1y ago
  Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make. Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually. The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.

dabedee 1y ago

I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through." The FTC wasn't blocking everything, just the deals that would entrench monopolies. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-startups-scaling-and-innovations-in-potential-law-breaking/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...

benreesman 1y ago
Yeah I think you're right. It's a sad commentary on the times when a group of people so far above average in caring about outcomes and data just go completely lizard brain in a way that comes out of their own paychecks.
scarface_74 1y ago
So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
- jbothma 1y ago
  Any evidence of that?
  - benreesman 1y ago
    Probably talking about character.ai and a few similar cases. It's not the trend GP is making it out to be.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago

DannyBee 1y ago

Having criticized a lot of her tenure (and still do!), Lina's problem was never whether she was right or not. It's that she was incredibly ineffective. Of course she was right. That's what made her practical ineffectiveness so problematic. She was often 100% right on what should be done but could only achieve 0-10% of it. I'd rather have someone who is 70% right on what should be done, but can achieve almost all of it, as some previous FTC chairs were.

benreesman 1y ago
Even this one victory (and it was more than one) is one more than the fucking nothing we're getting on pushback from the SEC to the FDA to the FCC and back again now: this is #CrimeSeason baby (or so its called on Twitter), oligarchs in the front row and all. The last 3 administrations have been soft on FAANG and its going really badly. The argument that she had the correct agenda, won a few, lost most to a captured judiciary (correct me if I'm mis-characterizing your position) is probably the stupidest thing I've seen on one of the dumbest threads in recent memory. Can you clarify where I've lost the plot with your argument and restore some of my sorely tested faith in humanity?
phillipcarter 1y ago
Why do you think she was ineffective?

aetherson 1y ago

Suppose that you have an opportunity to play a game. The game is you roll a fair normal six sided die. If it comes up a 6, you get $60B. If it comes up a 5 or 4 you get $30B. If it comes up 3 or less, you get $0. This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you. Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some downside protection. But then someone else says that's not allowed. So you play the game and you roll a six and get $60B. Does that prove the person who made you play it rather than sell it was "right," ex ante?

dabedee 1y ago
You raise a valid point about ex ante uncertainty. We can't know future outcomes with certainty, and yes, Figma theoretically could have failed. But antitrust analysis isn't about predicting exact valuations. It's about market structure and competitive dynamics. The FTC had observable facts: Adobe's dominant market share, Figma's rapid growth trajectory, and a purchase price of 50x revenue (extraordinary even for software). These factors suggested Adobe saw Figma as a competitive threat worth eliminating, not just a financial investment. That's the key distinction from your dice game; this wasn't pure randomness but observable market dynamics. You're right that we can't prove the counterfactual. But antitrust law doesn't require certainty, just reasonable probability of competitive harm. The extreme premium Adobe offered was itself evidence they valued removing competition more than acquiring assets. The outcome validates the analysis, but even if Figma had struggled, preserving the possibility of competition has value beyond any single company's success.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  But now you are contradicting your initial argument. Here you say that the price offered by Adobe was astronomically high, and therefore an indicator that the offer was not legitimate, but initially you said that the FTC made the right decision because the offer was 3x lower than the IPO price.
  - lukeschlather 1y ago

missedthecue 1y ago

It doesn't prove it. Khan attempted very fiercely to block Amazon's purchase of iRobot and she, along with the EU authorities, succeeded in preventing it and now iRobot is about to file bankruptcy. We don't have the counterfactual and founders (nor regulatory agencies) can see the future. Someone made a good analogy on twitter that Khan essentially cut off a genius pianist's right hand, the pianist persevered and somehow succeeded in retaining their talent in spite of having one hand, and now Khan is taking credit for the feat. In the same way, the fact that Figma still exists is not proof that she was right.

terminalshort 1y ago

> If you care about market cap? She was right. None of the FTC's business > If you care about employee comp? She was right. None of the FTC's business > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. None of the FTC's business x3 > If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Ok, so this is the FTC's business. But does Figma compete with Adobe in any major areas? I'm not aware of any major Adobe products like that.

maxbond 1y ago
> > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. > None of the FTC's business x3 > > If you care about consumer choice, she was right. > Ok, so this is the FTC's business. You don't think there's relationship between consumer choice and a large number of acquirers? These are basically equivalent statements, they're both saying "markets remain competitive".
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Only in the case where both the acquirer and the target have directly competing products, which is why I specifically mentioned that case and said it would be the FTCs business. (And even then sometimes it doesn't. Google bought Waze, which was a direct competitor to Google Maps, but still both products exist.) And, no, they aren't remotely equivalent statements to each other or to "markets remain competitive." If there are 100 products in a market, and an acquisition reduces that to 99, it will have no effect on the competitiveness of a market, which is why such an acquisition is not typically any of the FTC's business.
  - maxbond 1y ago
    No, that's just wrong, if you let Adobe buy up all the design tools then you limit designer's choice to just Adobe. Will they come out with a competing product? Maybe. That's their business. But the potential is there, and Adobe has to stay on its toes and can't coast on it's near-monopoly status. Indeed, it's now also possible Figma will come out with products to compete with Adobe. And just the threat of that has the potential to limit all of the hostile behavior towards consumers Adobe has been up to for years. Which is all to say that the market remains competitive. If you don't think it's the FTC's business to decide whether or not that 100 to 99 move is significant, then I don't think you understand. Even if it's insignificant - it's their business to make that call. You can disagree with it, but if you think that isn't their balliwick, you're simply mistaken.

Dylan16807 1y ago

> The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead. Blocking the merger was good. But I'm not convinced the IPO was good. I think trying to be a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars is only going to make Figma worse. I care about the users more than the people that got rich.

duped 1y ago
I mean the bigger problem with the IPO was that they opened at a 20b valuation and by the end of the day a bunch of investors got richer than anyone who built anything because the investment bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies
- blitzar 1y ago
  > bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies Small float, big hype, litterally designed to pump the stock on the float. 1.2bn was raised - of which only 0.8bn was cashing out existing shareholders - all the other investors got the pump as planned all for the low price of $1.6bn. Basically the existing shareholders got watered down by ~5% and the value of the shares they still hold are 3x and now liquid, better than they got in any of the vc funding rounds.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

The lashing she gets around here is disturbing.

benreesman 1y ago
The last time we came down this hard on one of the few diligent, competent, agressive, uncorrupted regulators with a weird mixture of old boys club sexism and tribal spinal reflex gang flag posturing was in 1996 give or take when Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers came after Brooksley Born as the Chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and forced her out via bunch of irregularities and other scandal-worthy maneuver. Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology). If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO. God knows what the price will be this time.