This post is the quintessential post about how success is about being part of the right networks. The cynical part of me calls it the old boys network, the realistic part says that unless you travel in the "right circles" your chances of real success are low. Despite what VCs will tell you about being in the right market, with the right team, and having "traction" and all that, those things only matter (and probably not much) if you aren't in the right network and circles. If you're in the right network, then having the wrong product, wrong market, wrong team, wrong market fit, bad traction, etc. doesn't really matter because those networks will "fix" those problems for you. VC isn't a meritocracy, it's a fairly closed network, and if you can get in you can be successful. For everyone else, success (of the Figma type) is almost near impossible.
> If you're in the right network, then having the wrong product, wrong market, wrong team, wrong market fit, bad traction, etc. doesn't really matter because those networks will "fix" those problems for you.
No amount of VC money can fix a bad company that doesn’t solve a burning problem for customers.
Conversely, if you do solve a burning problem for a lot customers, getting VCs onboard will be the least of your concerns.
“No amount of VC money can fix a bad company that doesn’t solve a burning problem for customers.”
From my observation VC money gives companies the opportunity to recover from mistakes (“pivot”) which is something companies without deep pockets can’t do.
More money definitely means more time to pivot and potentially make something work. However, most companies still fail, even after raising large amounts of money.
My contention with OP's point is the absoluteness of the statement they made. They basically claimed that knowing the right people will fix all of your problems. If you read what they wrote, that's almost literally what they said. That is in practice extremely far from the truth. For every successful VC-funded company, there are hundreds that never make it to product-market fit. So clearly VC funding and knowing the right folks isn't sufficient for success.
In making such a strong (and in general provably false) claim, the OP is also taking away credit from Figma for their wild success. They got there through understanding their customers and building the best product on the open market. Period.
It's strange because Figma's success has basically nothing to do with "having enough VC money to pivot around to find product-market fit", which is the central tenet of yours and OP's point. Figma was on the right track the entire time. So this whole point is moot when talking about Figma.
My comment was not about VC, it was about networks. If you're in the right networks problems will get fixed. Most VCs, to be blunt, are not in the right networks. The vast majority of VCs are "dumb money". The smart money is much harder to get precisely because of the value of the network. If you can get in with that network, your chance of success is high. Simply getting "venture capital" doesn't mean you're in the right network. In fact, the vast majority of the time, it doesn't. Which is why I agree also with what you said that VC money may give you more time to pivot, but doesn't guarantee success. I agree. That's why it has nothing to do with VC and everything to do with the right network.
You can s/VC/right network/ and I would still strongly disagree with your assertion that even if you're in the "right networks", that problems will get fixed.
Startups are fundamentally about finding product-market fit. No network can do the hard work of finding PMF for you.
Your claim seems to be that if you know the right people, you'll be successful. That's just flat-out wrong. So many startups are founded by people "in the right networks" and still fail. The vast vast vast majority of them do. How does knowing "the right people" (whoever this vague shadowy group of people are, I'm not even sure how you would define them) fix your problems for you?
Even more strangely, this has literally nothing to do with Figma. Like I stated earlier, they were successful because they worked on the right idea and executed flawlessly. What did their network do for them?
“Your claim seems to be that if you know the right people, you'll be successful. That's just flat-out wrong.”
With some of the high money acquisitions where one VC buys another VC company I definitely feel that there are cases where one investor does a favor for one of their buddies. Basically they bail them out.
Being in market is a product of choice or luck. Insofar as it’s good judgment that’s not privilege that’s being better, merit. Luck, winning the lottery of interests, isn’t merit but there’s no interesting sense in which it’s privilege either.
Having the right friends in the right networks help you both with market choice and product choice and also provide necessary insights for product-market fit. Not having the right friends or networks means that you have to indeed rely on choice or luck. Having the right network is a significant insight / inside advantage.
> No amount of VC money can fix a bad company that doesn’t solve a burning problem for customers.
How many SV entrepreneurs actually care about that? What problem is Snapchat solving? Or DoorDash for that matter?
The game is about raising capital, first and foremost. Especially in a system where the amount of money you can raise is inversely proportional to the company's actual profitability.
Losing money hand over fist? Let us introduce you to our pals at Softbank and the Saudi Arabia "Vision Fund".
I think it's pretty obvious what problems Snapchat and DoorDash are solving. Snapchat lets people stay in touch in fun ways and DoorDash lets people eat food without having to go out and get it themselves.
Maybe you personally don't find value in those companies, but hundreds of millions of people use Snapchat and tens of millions of people use DoorDash, so clearly they find value in it.
To go further on your point though, how did the Vision Fund solve any problems for entrepreneurs? It gave them a lot of money which they burned through, but then the floor fell out on businesses that weren't sustainable.
> Snapchat lets people stay in touch in fun ways and DoorDash lets people eat food without having to go out and get it themselves.
This is a marketing pitch, not a problem.
Restaurants have delivered since time immemorial and with better margins than anything Doordash has managed. The Snapchat "problem" was solved with two cans and a string. At least that was still an ad-free experience.
For every thousand startups struggling for traction and to get market/fit, there's the one founder with the right connections that will get there faster and with more funding because they have the right network and connections to accelerate product/market fit, fund raising, and attracting the right team. Not having the right network isn't a guarantee of failure by any means, but it certainly isn't as optimal has having a network with people in the right places. Having the right network and connections trumps almost everything else, in venture-backed startup world that is.
Seems rather easy to join this network: an internship. Which usually is awarded meritocratic, too.
But attitude matters a lot: if you sped this internship complaining how people are unfair and are not inviting you the their networks and circles - do not be surprised success eludes you.
I personally would never associate or invest in somebody with your mindset: you already lost. I’d rather work with wildly optimistic, even deluded, people.
If the network is that important, isn't there a startup looming that provides such a network to the many people who are not in one?
I tend to think that networks are not excluding on principle. If somebody can demonstrate value, people will be eager to include that person into the network. On the other hand, Quibi shows that networks alone cannot rescue startups.
The interesting group are all the average people who could create something successful (of the Figma type) together. As a group, they have access to all resources, but they don't coordinate them. $20B means that 20.000 people could come together and make $1M each. Maybe they need a tool (of the Figma type) to coordinate themselves and that's another startup opportunity.
A high value network is a group of people that have inherent trust or a common background or understanding that allows them to provide access to each other's highest value connections and resources. A low value network are those people that don't really know each other and won't trust providing access to high value resources or people, even if they share common interests. A network of people with common interests is not the same as a network of people with common background or other deep connections. This is what prevents startups (or LinkedIN or Meetup or what have you) providing the same depth of network as a "closed" network provides. By definition a high value network will be somewhat to very exclusionary. Low value networks are inclusive.
And no, networks alone can't accomplish much, and having a great network is no guarantee of success. But clearly having a great, high value network provides a significant advantage over not having any network or only access to low value networks.
My cynical point of view: if you try to replicate the benefits of a network with technology, social media, etc... the benefits of such a network quickly become overwhelmed by volume and the quality degrades.
This was such a delighting read for me. Not because it is a success story, but because of the way it talks about the human interactions. Thinking back, it is true that most of my very seemingly random leads came from people who were weakly connected with me and they would be considered equals.
Perhaps beyond that point of a weak connection is why SV is different than everywhere else. The author was ready to take a position in a startup out of the basic knowledge of the founder and the general idea. This is practically unheard of where I live. Yes, everyone wants to think it's like that, but in reality they will be asking for a "data room" from a week-old startup.
Yet again, you can't blame people because I don't know many intern-to-$20B-Adobe-exit around here... and there goes a cycle
> Thinking back, it is true that most of my very seemingly random leads came from people who were weakly connected with me and they would be considered equals.
For anyone else reading (sounds like the OP might already be aware), you may enjoy "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, a legendary paper in the field of network science, which describes exactly this phenomenon.
Adam writes that his investment criteria are "strong, authentic connection" to the problem, "big enough to generate venture returns", and "someone who is intelligent, trustworthy, and ambitious", and that Dylan was all three.
I feel like that papers over just how long it took for Figma to achieve takeoff with regards to revenue (https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1570881311153463296). must have been a nervous few years in the early days, and the series A/B folks really earned their keep.
A lot of designers are up in arms over this acquisition and have signaled they'll move on to the next non-adobe alternative, so it raises the interesting question: by way of some anchoring effect, will Penpot or other competitors now be revalued at a much higher amount almost regardless of what their revenue numbers are like?
> Adobe aren't buying Figma to kill it. It's their future.
That's for sure. And I can be sure that Adobe knows they are stuck having driven down a wrong road for some time.
The big question is: can they revamp? Figma is designed from the ground up to be cloud<-> web, while Adobe's big money spinners have a long legacy of all-on-the-desktop. It's very very hard to retrofit the latter into the former. And they have a huge legacy customer base most of whom are unlikely to want to change.
It will be interesting to see how they proceed. Use Figma as an excuse to "eat their own lunch" (instead of, say, porting Lightroom, build from scratch the competitor to Lightroom that someone else could have written?). Or try to retrofit Lightroom?
My suspicion is that if they try the retrofit path they will not make it.
Adobe has been slowly moving to the cloud. Almost imperceptibly. A version of Photoshop lives in the browser. Same for Express. I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead and they want to shorten the gap with an app that fills 80% of their collaborative needs. Then they sprinkle in their font and other technologies they’re good at.
>I just think they realize Figma is light years ahead
That's the problem - and what makes this a true silicon valley story. Big entrenched competitor buys innovative competition. Maybe they won't kill Figma, but they will definitely make it worse.
The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy. There's no regime change here. I see people comparing this to Microsoft acquiring Github. Microsoft is both orders of magnitude larger than Adobe and they paid way less for Github. They can afford to have Github as a form of "soft power" in the developer space, supporting their cloud work/developer stuff but indirect to their core revenue and business without needing to monetize it directly. Their CEO wasn't a moron and understood intrinsically there'd be a lack of trust and a hands off approach was needed. I'd be really surprised if Adobe shows the same grace in this situation. Figma was a direct competitor of their core business.
I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.
> The current CEO of Adobe has been CEO since 2007 and has led their awful Creative Cloud strategy.
I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context.
In '07, Adobe's stock price was around ~$40. Today, even after the (undeserved, in my opinion) thrashing the stock has taken for the Figma acquisition, it's at $300. He 10x'd a multi-billion dollar company in about a decade and a half, while also simultaneously redoing its entire monetization strategy. It's nothing to sneeze at.
A quick search turns up interesting numbers from this press release a year ago (literally the first result in my search, so not digging too deep here) [1]:
- all-time record revenues in Q3 2021
- 20-30% YoY growth in every segment they play in
- the DocuSign acquisition has turned into a cool ~2B/yr business
- and creative revenues of 2.4B, i.e., almost 10B/yr
As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron.
Is Adobe a dinosaur? Absolutely. Stock buybacks are a great indicator of this, in my opinion.
Could Adobe screw this up? Absolutely possible. As a good example, they do plenty of dark-pattern UX in their subscription and cancellation flows that I really don't like.
With all that said, I think there's a decent chance that we in the peanut gallery might look back on this in a few years and see it as a brilliant acquisition in the vein of WhatsApp and Instagram. Figma is a world-class product, leaps and bounds ahead of anything else. Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
>I know it's fun to rip on Adobe, but it's worth putting this in context.
It's fair that you made this assumption given the rest of my comment but when I said "awful" I meant as a user/customer, not necessarily from a business/revenue perspective.
You can juice a company and have it be more profitable even if the changes are unpopular with your customers, especially if you enjoy an almost monopoly status in terms of your software being what is used and taught in schools.
>As a handy rule of thumb, I like to assume that any long-term CEO of a profitable multi-billion dollar enterprise probably isn't a moron.
Fair, but he's used to running the company in a very "fuck the customer" kind of way. If Microsoft didn't have a new and not hated CEO, opened up private free repos on Github and basically not touched it in any other meaningful way I think it would have galvanized a big change in that space.
I just don't think Adobe is going to avoid pulling some kind of "fuck you" move that triggers an exodus the way Microsoft did. This is a much bigger acquisition for them than Github was with Microsoft.
I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
>Considering the price they paid, I bet Adobe understands this is an existential issue for them.
It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
If I was a shareholder, I'd want an explanation for how they ended up in this situation and what changes can be made to prevent it from happening again. But Adobe is culturally incapable of making good software, and it's clear they don't have product people in charge anywhere. At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
Fair points all around. And I do apologize for leaping to such an unfavorable interpretation of your comment.
I think you're right their monopoly position has spoiled them, and it's led them to treat their customers rather poorly.
> I also don't think the transition to SASS/Subscription was some brilliant business insight, rather par for the course with the rest of the industry changing.
The impressive part is not the insight; it's the fact he was able to pivot a multi-billion dollar behemoth through a change like this. There's lots of ossified incentive structures and politics in a giant company like this, and it does demonstrate real leadership that he was able to pull it off successfully.
It is admittedly more of a feat of execution than of innovation.
> It's funny to me that you make this point in the same comment where you talk about how great Adobe's business is. If they're crushing it so hard, why are they in a position where they have to spend 20 billion dollars to buy a company that is an existential threat to them?
Good question. And my answer is a bit of a cop-out, but I'd say it's basically the dictionary definition of disruption.
Once Adobe moved their business models to SaaS, they were puttering along and making little attempts at web-based software ("sustaining innovation"). Figma came along and grew from a prototyping tool to capture more and more of the design workflow; their disruptive innovation was baking collaboration in from the start.
The one insight as to "how to grow from this failure" (if you will) might come from the parallel to Instagram. After the acquisition, the Instagram product leaders were given more scope, resources, and power. Thanks to that, FB/Insta were able to successfully head off the threat from Snapchat by introducing Instagram stories. [1]
> At best, they don't do anything to Figma and it stagnates. At worst, significant price increases, reduced performance, worse UI is introduced, etc...
IMHO it would be (relatively) straightforward to leave the product team alone to continue iterating, while supercharging their GTM efforts by plugging Figma into Adobe's existing customer base.
To the Instagram example above, it would be very interesting if Figma's product brilliance was allowed to spread to the rest of Adobe's portfolio. As with most BigCo acquisitions, though, that's vanishingly unlikely. FB is IMHO a relatively unique counterexample in this respect. It's more likely people will drift off after their golden handcuffs disappear. They'll create the next generation of design startups, and the circle of life will continue.
Goes to show the beauty and power of focus. Adobe has so many apps to develop, manage, and assimilate into the “suite” biz model. Figma could pour their passion into _one_ app. Plus they started out with a collaboration at the core. Adobe has never really gotten collaboration, and I say that as someone who doesn’t really care about collab features because I work by myself.
Philosophy, product and brand strategy all go towards informing how stuff is designed. Adobe, I imagine, bought Figma to kickstart a new Adobe.
“ I do think that comparing Adobe to Microsoft in general is reasonable though. They are both software companies that make terrible software and have little incentive to improve because of how entrenched they are in the market. I've always thought of Adobe as the Microsoft of creative software.”
And both have been extremely successful as businesses for a very long time. They may not be on the list if “cool” companies but their track record speaks for themselves. Highly profitable and keep growing.
I'm a pretty advanced-level Photoshop user and I'm almost fine with Photopea except for the speed and general annoyance of it being a web-app -- if it were a desktop app I'd probably be fine with it.
Which is to say, I'd be fine with a $10 product vs. a $1000 one. In the same way that some professional 3d designers I know switched from Maya/c4d to the free Blender and are fine with it (except for the renderer, we still don't have a really good industry-grade GPU-accelerated renderer).
Point being that a compelling alternative can be made by a small, focused team in this day and age and offered at a pricepoint that big companies cannot compete with. I fully expect Penpot to take over Figma very soon, AfterEffects will be interesting because really what makes AE what it is is not necessarily AE itself but the killer RedGiant&VideoCopilot plugins so it is equally as vulnerable. There's really no telling where Adobe will be in another 5 years. I would not be surprised if it's 1/10th its current size; in fact I think it is the likely possibility..
Same. I wonder how many people have truly switched from Lightroom "Classic" to Lightroom ("Cloud). I still base my work in Classic, but I wonder how widespread that is.
This week I tried the Figma desktop app which I imagine is an electron app. Opened up fine the first time; subsequent attempts just showed a blank screen, so I tried the web browser version. Ugh, felt so slow to open and unresponsive.
Part of the mental brick wall I have is that I’ve always equated browsers with surfing/reading and other light stuff. Opening a desktop app puts me in work mode. And the UIs (seeing the browser chrome in context with the app itself) makes me feel like I’m running a less robust app. I imagine these are hurdles I’ll have to get over within the next couple of years as more apps move to the browser :(
Adobe moved Creative Collection to the cloud like 5+ years ago and at this point the desktop implementations are pretty much "legacy" and don't see new feature development/etc.
I actually would prefer to just buy Lightroom but I can't.
What I'm saying is that the cloud version is not the same as the CC version (DRM or no). The offline version is moved to legacy status and isn't seeing feature updates anymore.
I’m a pretty active open source developer, having a couple reasonably popular projects myself and been a team member of an extremely success one. I’d say maybe one in one hundred projects I’m interested in is on gitlab.com. Last year they stopped allowing anonymous search on hosted issue trackers, and it took me the better part of a year to even notice (I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252501 when I did notice), and I only noticed it on a project that’s developed on GitHub but uses gitlab.com for issue tracking, a choice made back when GitHub’s issue tracker was a lot more primitive. That is to say, I had to search a gitlab.com issue tracker once in a whole year, while I search plenty of open source issue trackers all the time. That’s how irreverent gitlab.com for open source is at least to me.
yeah lets not rehash this debate, this same back and forth already happened on the announcement thread. we all know adobe aren't the best stewards historically, but intentions are good, yada yada. time will tell.
What nonsense. 9-10 years to build a successful company is laudable, and along the way there are many metrics which can matter more than net profit.
Reinvesting in growth when you're competing with Adobe makes significant sense to me. He went into this with chances that would not look good to any analyst at the start. This is going to have a profoundly different growth curve than your typical Kickstarter startup.
> Regardless, Dylan was brilliant and delight to talk to about almost any topic, and we kept in touch loosely through social media when he went back to school. He ended up interning at Flipboard, a company that happened to be founded by an engineer from Apple who co-taught CS 196P at Stanford with me, their first class on iPhone development. Dylan stayed close to the data science team at LinkedIn, and so we ended up with more than a few reasons to stay connected. I had left LinkedIn to take an EIR role at Greylock, so was just starting to become an active angel investor.
This is insane. This reality doesn't exist for >99% of people.
From reading about Dylan, seems like he came from a middle class background. Of course, where you start off is relative, and you can always go in extreme directions to discount the success of any person ("Oh he grew up in a house with lights, what a privilege etc...)
LucidChart was founded around 2008 (couple years before Figma). Their use of WebGL predates Figma's by atleast couple of years, and I remember it was famous enough as a startup to be very visible as a web graphics tool. There must have been other older startups which I'm not aware of.
The narrative seems to ignore this. Infact when Figma came around I thought the idea was to combine Sketch (which was truly a pioneer, but limited to only to Mac) and LucidChart kind of web graphics tool to make a platform agnostic 'Sketch'.
Great idea - but it was mostly about execution, which was of course was beautifully done.
This is like saying Symbian did everything and more than the iPhone. Technically true, but you definitely miss the point. I’m also not an iPhone fanboy. My phone history includes the 6600, the ngage, ngage-qd, and androids till 2016. Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate what apple did.
Hence Apple narrative is around Steve Jobs - great product manager, great marketing person, decisive; company elevating ordinary ('oldish' tech) to extraordinary using power of design,... etc. Apple is not about inventing new tech.
Whereas this blog somewhat smells of “History is Written by Victors."
Figma as mentioned earlier executed beautifully, no doubt. But the blog narrative is somehow projecting that Figma had vision of WebGL vis-a-vis browser based graphic tools, which I know is not really true and somewhat akin to history is being written by victor.
Instead, Dylan & I talked about the transition from Desktop to Web 2.0, and whether now was the right time to bring graphic design to the cloud. John Lilly & I had discussed a hypothesis about this while I was at Greylock, and it was one where I had come to have conviction. The basic premise was that the combination of Web 2.0, Social, and Mobile had finally created the possibility of building truly useful and user-friendly collaborative software in the cloud...
This is also disrespectful to the pioneers - nary a word was wasted on people who came before Figma on browser as well as desktop. I wish there was atleast one line dedicated to 'Sketch' software - early version of Figma UI was copy-paste of Sketch one.
>Sketch (which was truly a pioneer, but limited to only to Mac)
Fireworks had almost all the essential parts of Sketch a decade earlier. Adobe killed it after acquiring it, because despite owning 80% of creative tooling they don’t understand their own software.
what did end up happening to Lucidchart in the end? i see they had a $3b round, but definitely seem to have stalled out in terms of excitement. anyone know the company/product enough to offer some insight?
> Maybe the lure of several billion is too much to resist.
Well yes seems obvious, unless they already had that kind of money. It's easy to say that from the sidelines, since I assume you haven't turned away several billion of dollars
I’m kind of assuming that since they had a 20B company, they were reasonably well compensated (say several million a year).
Short of a slightly bigger house, I already have difficulty imagining what I’d use more money for (aside from start another similar company, which seems kind of pointless).
There are many interesting ways to spend a billion - funding other founders, investing in under-invested areas globally or in your community, starting a scholarship fund for folks less fortunate, building a big yatch, etc etc.
Another good reason to exit is also just to rest, take some time and enjoy the world a bit after being deep in founder mode for so long.
Amassing a ton of money can make sense if for instance we develop immortality in the next few decades. Having enough money to secure the treatment at the right time could be the difference yielding centuries of extra lifetime
The old behemoths are maybe breaking antitrust law (Clayton Act) in buying off all their competitors, and there appears to be an imminent govt investigation of the Figma-Adobe deal. The form here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FK7mMKOpB-Zbf387-NrByWSvr8g...) is taking comments from the public to help the investigation.
The only success would be being the “iPhone” and turning Adobe into a “Nokia”.
Might take another decade or maybe even 3 but when it happens people will finally be asking why Figma surrendered the same why we look at IG now and ask why did they ever sell.
As a 31yo just barely getting started in my own entrepreneurial journey, I find Dylan to be an inspiration. Everything I hear and read about him is so awesome, and how he really cares about the customers, users, and product. Kudos.
I think everything is a “repeat” of something else, but the things that get big usually have something that really differentiates them and blows the competition out of the water.
I use figma and fig jam every day. Prior to figma I used sketch and some other apps. They all were missing two key features: ease of use and collaboration.
Not needing a mac, and being able to design in the browser with your whole team was a game changer. Throw plug ins into the mix, and a solid community.
- “On June 25, 2013, Dylan Field, one of my favorite interns from LinkedIn dropped by Wealthfront headquarters in Palo Alto to catch up and get some advice about his new startup, https://figma.com/.”
- “The best solution for a problem five years ago may not be the the best solution today, and it very likely won’t be the best solution five years from now. As a result, young engineers approaching problems for the first time can sometimes see opportunities that the most experienced can’t.”
> This acquisition is just one more step in the fulfillment of a broad vision to elevate design in every organization.
This very much remains to be seen. Writing that as though it were a foregone conclusion is disingenuous at best (not to call it hollow marketing drivel, or a comforting lie). The only “fulfillment” that we can assume for now is that Figma's founders made a boatload of money. And maybe that's all the fulfillment you can ever hope for.
Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features? Does it actually do some computations server side? Clearly the Adobes of the world haven't gone whole hog into online first/collaborative editing (and probably never will due to inertia), but one can imagine someone more nimble doing so without running in a browser.
Afaict the uniquely web thing about this product is the lack of install (and to be fair maybe that's a killer feature). Is that it or am I missing something.
You can run Figma as a desktop app with cloud features. It's a wrapper around the same core as the web app of course. I'm fairly sure of that, though I guess I don't technically know that it's true.
"Unique", I don't know. The advantage is that the cost to get people to engage with a design file is so low that it actually happens. It's just a link you click, and you're now looking at the design, or even a clickable prototype of the design. And I'm there, you can see my cursor zipping around, and you can leave a comment, or start a voice chat, and all of a sudden, I'll be damned we're collaborating.
If it's a desktop app, and they have to download it, a lot of people just don't do that.
I've only used Figma a few times to review designs, but found this unsettling.
Like if I was working away at my desk, and turned around to discover someone standing there watching me work. I would find that uncomfortable.
In my case, I was the one that felt like I was spying on the designer working. I couldn't tell if they knew I was there.
It seems like anyone with access to a particular project can watch the designer working away without being seen. Is this accurate? Is there a way to switch the multiplayer feature off?
I don't think you can turn it off, but what you can do is work in your Drafts folder, or work on a file that isn't shared. I've done this for designs I don't think are ready to be looked at.
You can always know if somebody is watching your file, because their avatar picture pops up in the top right corner. You could miss noticing that, if you're really focused on something. But if someone is zoomed in far enough to be watching what you're doing, their cursor is probably going to be visible on your screen.
Thanks. I will explore the Drafts folder and other options.
I will never be comfortable with my team members watching me work without my control over that. Unless of course we're on a call with the intent to collaborate and share in real time. Otherwise I'm not onboard the idea that "multiplayer" is the default way of working.
My mouse movements and decision making at any given second in time are not inherently valuable, and are a mine to share, not Adobe's to publish.
It bothers me that the likes of Adobe and others try so hard to push a paradigm that results in more data points for them. More spying windows into the designer's processes, right down to mouse movement and other details. I don't understand why designers are rushing to hand over such data to what is essentially a cloud service data miner, soon to be Adobe.
> Serious question, what about Figma is unique to a cloud app over a desktop app with cloud features.
There's probably nothing unique about it, but the server/browser model allows anyone on a team to access the Figma project as long as they have a web browser, while a classic client/server model would require a dedicated client software to be installed to access the project.
On my last job, we switched from using Abstract for sharing designs between the designers and developers, to using Figma for both designing and sharing between all team members, and the switch was a huge success.
Speaking for myself alone, the experience on Abstract was pretty terrible: the native application didn't have a Linux version, and the web client was dog-slow, buggy and limited in features. Figma, on the other hand, being the same web client for everyone, meant a pretty decent experience from the get go, which was a welcome change TBH.
First Adobe lost digital product designers a decade ago. First to Sketch, and then to Figma. Photoshop/Illustrator wasn't really made for designing digital products. Photoshop's most features are built around photos, bitmaps and pixels, and the industry moved from pixels assets to vectors or rendered UI. Adobe didn't really have tool dedicated to digital products. They bought Fireworks in 2005 but then kind of killed it. They finally woke up in 2016 and introduced Adobe XD but it was too late and it product was meh. Also many designers also hate Adobe and their creative cloud to the Adobe brand didn't help either.
Sketch came along with a tool for designing digital products, like websites, mobile apps etc. It was really good, but it was a native Mac application that dealt with local .sketch files. To share the design the person would need to send them the sketch file and they would generally the same major Sketch version installed on their Mac. They also were operating an "indie" team in the Netherlands and were kind of removed how Silicon Valley teams design and build products.
When Figma came along, they were bit behind of Sketch in terms performance and design features, but they had the cloud/browser first architecture where there is no local files. There is no files on anyone computers, everyone in the company has access to all the files. There generally no versions, you edit the latest file. They also listened what product design teams actually needed. For example they came to the Airbnb design team to ask about what we would need for the design system and components, and then they basically built that (I assume they also talked to other teams). They also built simple prototyping tools which then killed Invision and the cottage industry of other prototyping tools. The web sharing and basic handoff tools kind of made Zeplin and Abstract obsolete.
So in the end what Figma built was a design tool that product designers and the product teams needed. It had the cloud, collaboration and the features that work in a way that make sense how things are designed and built today.
It's little bit like you can run your own git server and setup, but what Github build was the workflow and the tools for teams or groups of people to build things together. Adobe still operates in the world where they sell these specialized git clients for specific types of users for but there are no workflows or really a way to do anything together.
This post really shows how much luck/privilege it takes to have a chance at success. Stanford, intern at LinkedIn, being able to just "drop by" in Palo Alto. "Silicon Valley is about People" and it takes a lot of money to get access to those people. The fall of Silicon Valley will be when anyone with the right idea and the ability to build it is able to get funding to actually build it.
I was an employee of LinkedIn at the time that Dylan was an intern. His talent and drive were really something special. He wasn’t content to just do the project he was given. He was making demos and presenting at company all hands. I remember him participating in a bunch of culture stuff. Yes, knowing the right people matters but Dylan put in the work that made them pay attention. I’ve never since seen an intern like him.
I think the OP's has nothing to do with Dylan. Yes, he is incredibly impressive, but you're blinded by something if you think that ability and drive is unique.
It’s pretty unique in bigger companies and SV. IMHO, those people tend to go to smaller companies where they can have an outsized impact, or start their own business. For them, money isn’t even on their radar.
I think this is a pretty cynical viewpoint. You are right, he had privileges, but millions of other kids have them as well. For instance, he worked hard to impress at LinkedIn to get that meeting.
I love when someone extremely smart and dedicated succeeds. Much better than a VC thought leader that happened to luck into the right startup and is now dispensing money and advice with abandon. That is luck and privilege.
I think you've misunderstood the point of the post you are replying to.
Pointing out the rare advantages Dylan had in founding Figma doesn't take away any of his accomplishment. Privileged people accomplish things and overcome things and do good stuff.
The point is to highlight that the privilege is load bearing - that a good idea and an amazing drive is not enough and that you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people in order to get that idea off the ground.
It's not that Dylan should have had to work harder, but that millions of other driven people's ideas die for lack of exposure.
"you often need to seem nice and likable to wealthy people" is a very important point.
Part of it is ... sort of generically true in any chosen power structure in the world (easier for powerful people to do things for you if they like you, in theory). But because so much of this dealmaking and the like, and the completely capricious nature of VC funding in particular, means that if you're wanting to fundraise your job ends up being "be friends with the people with money".
And because it's so informal and based on friendships, each generation of money is... well, it's replicating culture from the previous generation. At least in more formal power structures there are exams or something to stop it from _just_ being about hiring people you like talking to.
The silver lining is I bet there's a huge untapped market in helping fund people in environments that don't require you to listen to a VC talk about how BTC is about taking power away from oppressive governments or whatever.
I bet there are loads of people who are interested in funding, in seriousness, and not necessarily looking for more drinking partners.
What I think of is privilege is the family you were born into and opportunities available at the school district you went to. Millions of people have those privileges, but only a few create a ground breaking company.
Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
> Once he graduated from high school, the way he differentiated, including being friendly to future VC’s was his own doing and drive.
I think this only makes sense if you believe that "being friendly to future VC's" is entirely independent from "the family you were born into" - to which I would add social class and family connections. Given my experience with friendships and professional relationships I think you would have an advantage in getting to meet a VC and then making a good impression if you had experience interacting with people like them.
None of this is to say that it's impossible to make it without those advantages, but they do exist.
Stanford doesn't admit millions. There is no capacity for millions in Silicon Valley, there isn't the parking or public transport or apartments or offices or emergency rooms, nothing NOTHING anywhere close to that. Palo Alto is a very sleepy town, tallest building is 7 stories, then everything else is 4 or less. Not millions. By no means.
I enjoy the people I meet living in Palo Alto but yes, it’s very sleepy. Couple bars downtown and that’s it, really. In Europe it’d be classed as a small town.
I grew up in Palo Alto. My point was that millions of people had his privilege growing up (myself included) and only a select few make it into Stanford (or Brown in his case) (myself not included!).
Saying someone is privileged because they graduated from Stanford highly discounts a person’s agency in their life.
Ok, I did. Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
This said, it is impressive in a mild sense. While convenience / access (the pitch's main take away) is a huge factor in the macro-state creativity - if these affordances are not paired with meaning, a sense of taste, or purpose - then one quickly ends up with 'animate all the things' level thinking (the micro-state of today). For some, this means a great income and massive economic mobility - not something to sneeze at. However, designing everything to be the same, from securing reproductive care to hailing a car, sterilizes the lives lived through software.
>Figma is absolutely valuable as evidenced by its customer base.
See how quickly Quark lost the most loyal and hegemonic user base to Adobe InDesign just over Adobe choosing to use the TeX paragraph formatter. Gone in eight quarters. Figma doesn't have itself embedded in national scale print plant with degree level of user education and per seat licensing including the multiple necessary third party adaptations at >$10k per seat.
I drove Uber in Menlo Park/Atherton/Palo Alto while I was undergoing some treatments at the VA in Palo Alto and it is indeed a rarified atmosphere. It's not all peaches and cream however. People talked to me about the teen suicides due to the immense pressure to achieve status and academically perform at the highest levels.
The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why are so many kids with bright prospects killing themselves in Palo Alto?
Suburban middle class parents, especially immigrants (and even more immigrants from Asia) tend to look on GreatSchools and pick Mission San José / Monta Vista / Gunn, and our crazy pressure on their kids.
It means people from there tend to have quite high achieving in life, at a pretty high mental health cost that follows them for life. It’s an open secret if you ask folks who graduated from there.
Of course, people with a bit more connections / more money just send their kids to private school instead.
The funny thing about many of those 'top schools'. You're actually worse off as top universities cap the number of students from a given high-school. Worse yet, most the kids are doing after school tutoring to boost their scores, making it an arm race.
I'd argue that a well motivated student would do better by being in a slightly worse school
The most important aspect of a top school is that a student is around classmates with high drive (maybe family influenced) to succeed. This does not just create competition, most importantly, you get the signaling that it is ok and expected to study hard, to do your homework, to say no to playing so that you can finish your assigned homework.
Now if you have a top student in a lagging school, most likely the classmates will drag them down. In my school good students were physically bullied by the “cool” guys.
I think that classes need to be divided based on the performance of the students, that will be assessed on regular intervals. Let the good students go as fast as they need to, focus for the lagging students to get at least the basics right. There is no reason to pretend that we are teaching advanced calculus to lagging students, when they cannot even do simple arithmetic operations.
This is incorrect. You need to attend a school admissions counselors are familiar with. They often can’t evaluate grades, academic advisors, or recommendation letters from schools they don’t repeatedly place students from, and therefore have a harder time making a case for high performing students from unknown schools.
I once talked to an admissions counselor for a “selective” university who could name the challenging coursework and reliable recommendation letter writers at all the best high schools in the region she covered.
Yes, and the mental health aspects can result in continuing challenges. A family friend had three kids go through HS in PA and not only did none of the kids end up in a particularly great school, two of the three kids didn't finish on time due to unspecified/emotional issues.
When we were house-hunting we took it as a consolation that we couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto!
Grades are only but one aspect of going to a "top school", the networking associated with it cannot be underlooked. It is likely that the students will create connections with others that may benefit them in the future, the same could be said about the parents too.
Are you sure there is a cap? There were a huge number of Stanford and Cal accepts my year and literally nobody talked of caps.
I do agree that talent could be drowned out at a school like Gunn, whereas you might stand out more at a less prestigious school.
I find it astounding that people still talk in terms of "talent". What else, do we still think America is a meritocracy? By and large, people.perform exactly as their socioeconomic status would predict. "talent" is a myth.
If you think the US is a perfect meritocracy you’re a fool. If you don’t think it’s a great deal closer to it than an enormous majority of past and present societies you’re a bigger fool. The same is true of the entire OECD and many countries outside it to greater and lesser degrees.
Elite colleges have required suicidal amounts of pressure to be admitted, for decades. I went through that, just that I got in. Typically with serious Attention Deficit Disorder and no treatment, there's no way to get into the top 6 schools.
No matter how otherwise intelligent, too many points lost to disorganization. Like can't start essays until last minute, forget the test that was coming up, 0% on some homeworks, very little sleep because of the procrastination that was a direct consequence of that condition, huge late penalties, when you need 90% averages for semester grades for all courses, an 89% is an F in that setting. Like then you gotta pull off miracles to make the grade back up. And for that you have to be desperate. That was the hard part, SAT was easy and fun, extracurriculars were competitive but cool, also fun, hard part was the GPA. Crazy standards.
It's a process with many satisfied quiet survivors and a smaller number of very visible tragic deaths.
Sure your point is a good one in general, but you're combining multiple profiles to create this narrative. Dylan didn't go to Stanford, he went to Brown University. Being an intern, you usually don't have a car, and it's not as easy to get from Sunnyvale (LinkedIn headquarters) to Palo Alto as the story sounds, especially pre-UberX. So the "dropping in" is not like they were living in the same city.
LinkedIn HQ was in MV for quite a while, no? IIRC they were on land owned by Google.
And getting between MV and PA has always been pretty easy via Caltrain, and the various corporate shuttles that connect it to destinations.
The one bit that didn't resonate for me, as a local, was the reference to "City Center in Palo Alto". I've lived here for a long time and never heard a reference to "City Center".
There's "downtown"/"University Ave.", "Cal Ave.", and "midtown" (though there's not much there). Has anyone else ever heard of "City Center"? Were they literally just walking around City Hall or something?
"[In 1885] Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop had in mind to establish a town across El Camino Real to support the needs of Stanford University, including student housing, shopping, and recreation, but no liquor. The Stanfords asked the leaders of Menlo Park and Mayfield to close their saloons, but were answered 'No.'"
"With Stanford University's support, saloon days faded and Palo Alto grew to the size of Mayfield. On July 2, 1925, Palo Alto voters approved the annexation of Mayfield. The two communities were officially consolidated on July 6, 1925."
Ah i remember basically living out of the Sheraton in downtown Palo Alto for the better part of a year thanks to not accepting a permanent move to the bay area. It all seemed so weird at the time.
The sense i got of the place was one who's grandeur had passed. The furniture and the houses there seemed so dated, walking around the neighborhoods exposed all the cracked concrete on the sidewalks and the graffitis under the tunnel leading up University.
Take a short walk and you're in the great lawn at Stanford, such a shame how a beautiful city like that is not treated as it should be. I had far better experiences of public infrastructure during trips to poorer countries. The airport felt ignored, the caltrains felt dated and inefficient on the inside, i don't know. . . it just felt like everyone was waiting for a nuke to level the place and rebuild better than making it better right now.
Palo Alto is famously anti-development. Far ahead in the digital world but stuck in the 20th century physically. And Stanford has so much open land for nothing but nature. I mean come on…
FWIW, Caltrain is being electrified and there are people fighting for more development and density.
This doesn’t resonate with me at all about Palo Alto. From Sheraton, it is an easy walk to University Ave, and you are greeted by the cult coffee shop Verve which is at the very end of the strip. You also have Evvia one block away, numerous other restaurants, West Elm, RH, Real Real, a giant Apple store, the Nobu hotel, a huge Blue Bottle Coffee, Indian classic Rooh. So not sure what you were looking at. I also find Caltrain to be quite nice - clean modern stations with clean quiet ride.
You walk under the tunnel or through the Sheraton parking lot and across the stanford shuttle stop . . . compare that to say, downtown Austin or Houston and you see what i mean. After 9pm, those streets are desolate with the sole diner/creamery showing signs of life.
I travel internationally for work and when my return trips land in SFO occasionally, it feels like i've travelled back in time to an alternate timeline where the US lost the war or something.
My impression of Palo Alto as a single person was that it was beautiful, but quiet. It seemed to be oriented around family life, and families are generally not out and about after 9pm.
People looking for nightlife tended to gravitate towards San Francisco.
It's not even "Nightlife". It's weird, any sort of social gatherings past 9pm just didn't seem to exist (Except for the creamery/diner, some pockets of isolated restaurants). I would expect a college town to have some life, kids out and about after a late game etc. . .not the case, and i was there for a while.
Palo Alto isn't a college town, even though it looks like one at first. Palm Drive is long and it feels even longer, and after hours people generally stay on their respective sides of the moat.
As far as feeling suppressed, $4,000/mo rents for small apartments will generally do that to a place.
You're not alone in disliking the place. I did a three-year postdoc at Stanford, and after my first year I moved to SF because it was clear that's where all the social life was.
When was this? Palo Alto felt a little bit like what you describe around 2011-2012 after the economy crashed and Facebook had moved from its numerous downtown offices to their campus. The place has really recovered though.
"Around University Avenue" is the only reasonable deduction. Calling the other ones center would be too weird, and yes, if you take a stroll there, you could overhear a lot of such types of conversations.
I was pitching an Open Source developer tools startup around here at this time. VCs laughed in my face since there's no business model in OSS or in developer tools.
Looks like there's a bunch of OSS companies doing well now, with their business model being getting paid for a hosted version of their software. Posthog is a good example.
This was around that time. That's my point. In the valley companies like ours got funding for OSS and developer tools at that time (Xamarin, Github, etc.). But in other places it took 5+ years for the dime to drop...
How does it demonstrate that? Dylan had funding by the time this conversation occurred. He didn't need the authors money. The article doesn't describe how it is that Dylan acquired his initial funding.
Also important to note that the author was nowhere near as high profile or rich when this occurred as he is today. This interaction happened when Wealthfront was just beginning.
Sure, someone with an early idea (with seed fund, but that’s not the only funding round is it), is only chatting with a vc guy for just fun. Even continuing a premise, I would like to chat with some VCs for fun too, can I get an appointment? I promise im just as smart and insightful.
He doesn't explicitly state this in the piece, but it was pretty easy to infer from the things he does say. He has the connection to Nash precisely because he impressed him when he was interning at LinkedIn, before Nash became a VC, and before he founded WealthFront.
This is not a story of privileged connections in the slightest.
> This post really shows how much luck/privilege it takes to have a chance at success.
You're defining "success" as making billions of dollars, right?
In any case, if that's someone's definition of success and they make it, wonderful. It's great for them that they had luck and privilege. The greatest thing anyone can do for children and even yourself is to maximize "privilege".
I suggest you also talk to people with a more diverse outlook on life too though, I think it will be even more eye-opening. Take a random walk in a rural farming community, a small town, an average city or suburb, etc. You will find many people who have found success and happiness and are content because their idea of success is to raise and provide for a family, or own a home, or run their modest small business, or whatever.
Rockefeller still had some privileges that allowed him to navigate the world easier while carrying his ambition with him—being male and Caucasian—and that’s not to speak of the people that he collaborated with along the way.
I’m not interested in discussing race or gender politics here, but it’s worth pointing that out since your comment comes off as completely dismissive of systemic advantages, environmental factors, and personal networks that all contribute to success, as if to say that any personal success is the product of a single factor alone: grit.
No, not alone, but no one but those guys would have done what they did. There were many other barefoot boys tending to horses but it was Genghis who got up there and took over half the world. It wasn't the other kids, it was him. And later on it wasn't his generals, but he who oversaw the conquests. They all could have raised armies instead, but, it was actually him with the vision and singular aim.
Same with Jobs and Masayoshi, other people also knew the people they knew, but only they did do what they ended up doing.
So those are facts, but what is the point that you’re getting at? Are you making the case that their successes were inherent in them, or that their motivations were shaped by some experience unique to them, or were they just destined to be such by history?
I mean, can you measure that or draw a direct causation? I’m also just contesting how much is inherent to an individual, and whether it is any worth bringing up that point against the idea that external factors have a significant impact to success, which is already nuanced enough not to say that external factors are the sole indicators?
A small tangent piece of writing advice: if you're writing for an audience, anytime you use the name of a startup, include a few words to say what it does. Don't make the reader click away to learn this.
