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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

What a non-interview.

I’m not expecting Adobe to kill Figma or raise the price overnight. I’m not angry about any of that, I’m angry that I’ve now built team workflows around a product that means I have to pay money to a company that doesn’t spend it on making products better and relies on vendor lock-in to propagate.

Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.

But you didn’t. Great journalism guys.

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I believe Matt Stoller, who studies and writes about monopolies is collecting feedback about the effects of this merger on professionals in the industry [0].

From the sound of it you could be a valuable voice in there. The merger will probably have to go through approval in DC. Perhaps if sufficient evidence is collected it could be blocked in accordance with anti-trust law. He wrote about how there is a heap of evidence about Adobe’s history of mergers and acquisitions which only lead to reduction of consumer choice.

[0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/should-the-government-blo...

I can't understand why the Figma purchase isn't being blocked for antitrust. Have we learned nothing??

Definitely over the past two years antitrust went from a niché topic that nobody knew anything about to front page news. Something definitely did change.

With Lina Khan heading FTC antitrust and public sentiment on board I think we can expect real progress in the coming years. However, it is also clear that discrete and methodical protection of monopoly power is also significant source of stability and income for all political parties.

I've repeatedly heard the sentiment from interviewers that it's not worth the time asking questions you know you won't get an answer to. As a sibling noted, both of your questions can reasonably fall into that category.

Not disagreeing, just lamenting the sad state of journalism nowadays, at least as I perceive it.

I’d have to ask why even do the interview at all then. Like I can save everyone involved a lot of time and just imagine the interview if you’re not gonna ask a difficult question.

I assume it is PR. Previously, broadcasters and their journalists held some bargaining power in interviews such that in exchange for being able to access a broad population, the interviewee would be willing to subject themselves to the journalist’s questions.

The internet kind of obviated that role, so now there is no need for an interviewee to subject themselves to questions they do not want, because they can reach everyone they want at no cost by putting up a blog post on their website.

Bingo. Discard this so-called interview as a fluff piece. It provides no signal.

Sometimes the lack of an answer can be just as telling, making it still worth asking even if they won't answer the question directly.

A good interviewer would then ask follow up questions to either get a straight answer or highlight the absence thereof. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream tech "journalism" is just repackaged press releases written by people hoping to get hired by the very same companies that they "report" on. Thence the softball questions and toothless interviews all in an effort to not upset any potential future employers.

Both those questions could, and would, be answered with the usual “trust us, it’ll be great!!” message that every acquisition announcement contains.

> Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.

Well, it's a business, not a non-profit.

In business everything is for sale at any moment in time, if the price is high enough. Especially, when there are multiple shareholders with different goals.

As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.

Maybe a few years later he won't even be with Adobe anymore. Just like the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer with Meta.

Building tools to dethrone Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects IS a good business though. You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.

Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.

> Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

There is no objective “good” or “bad” move. If the owner feels like selling and that helps them meet their goals in life, then that is “good” for them. If iPhone or Android owners want to bet they can usurp Nokia and want to take on more risk, then that is “good” for them.

Or maybe they just sold RiM or HTC at the peak. Certainty has significant value.

> You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.

The question for Figma was, if they would ever reach $20B+ market cap after an IPO, and how long it would take them to do so.

The decision to sell to Adobe was surely based on many calculations. Just like Whatsapp's decision to sell to Facebook for $19B.

> Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

Android Inc. was a company sold to Google in 2005 for short term profit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Where would Android be now without the backing of Google? Where would iPhone be now without the backing of Apple?

> Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.

There are multiple accounts of how many resources, human capital, and know-how Facebook put into Instagram to scale it. The same can be said about YouTube in the hands of Google.

You would probably say, that selling Vine to Twitter was a great decision, because it got eventually shut down as being worthless. But look at where Bytedance is with TikTok now.

> As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.

Sorry, but: no.

There are many ways to work in the world, and certainly one way is to be an amoral mercenary in search of profit.

But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.

The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.

> But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.

The job of an entrepreneur is to calculate everything and to make the right decision in every situation.

There could be many reasons behind the decision to sell to Adobe for $20B:

– Maybe reaching the $20B market cap after an IPO would have taken a very long time for Figma on its own;

– Maybe were was an extremely high risk of Adobe acquiring another competitor or building a competitive product in-house;

– Maybe the investors wanted the have an exit now, 10 years after the company's creation;

– Maybe the founders had other ideas they wanted to work after their vesting with Adobe expires.

> The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.

For some companies the right exit is IPO, for others – acquisitions. But if they took any money from investors, they must have an exit.

You're right, my comment was overblown (night-posting) and I wasn't even reacting to the Figma acquisition but rather to the general implication that entrepreneurs should want money as opposed to wanting to create a good thing (like Figma!) in the world. In the best case they want both.

I wish both Figma and Adobe well, and I hope they do cool stuff together.

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