Even from capital point of view everyone is now forced to make their bet - either on adobe or figma, so it’s more efficient capital allocation too.
- sell the company to a bigger player, reinforcing their dominant position (often close to monopolistic in tech).
- go to IPO, keeping the company independence and fighting power concentration.
People keep coming up with theories that companies are about to corner the market then over-charge, but the theories vastly outnumber the cases where it ever happens in practice. It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
A clone would need to start from scratch and compete against a huge corporation with virtually unlimited funds.
> It is almost always that the biggest companies in the market are just more competitive (lower prices or higher quality) than all the others.
That is almost always not what is happening. The big players extinguish any would-be competition early by buying them or throwing sticks into their wheels. They can afford to strategically make a loss in a given area to underbid the competition by overcharging in others, or relying on synergies. There are numerous examples where small teams built highly qualitative alternatives to corpo stuff, but had to compete against the network effects and brand names instead.
2. Yes, Figma luckily IPOed in an extremely hot market
Getting a bit lucky doesn't mean this was a success overall. The conclusion has many more years to go before it gets written. Either way, I don't like the over reach by Lina Khan.
A company exists primarily to make things for consumers and the FTC ensures they do that fairly. The IPO, stock price and everything else is secondary.
What do you mean over reach? It's the FTC's job to prevent consumer market consolidation.
Also, the EU and UK also made it clear they were against the merger. In fact, if you look at most reporting, the EU and UK seem to be the main reason they gave up, presumably because they know the US FTC has no teeth, even with a competent chair.
I don't have a popular opinion on HN. I don't think Google should be broken up because new technology has made Google search much less needed. I don't think Apple should relinquish control over its app store because it's Apple's platform and they should do what they want. I don't think Adobe should be stopped from buying Figma because even if Adobe buys it, maybe some rich ex-employees might quit and make another competitor or make an open source alternative. Who knows.
People on HN wants the government to weaken tech companies but not when it's the tech company they're working in.
Free market requires maintenance. Laissez-faire is a lie and always has been.
If you let all the companies consolidate into mega monopolies who have a stranglehold on the market, where is the free market?
In any case, it's irrelevant they are not eternal (especially if we go from monopoly to monopoly), the point stands: if you have a monopoly you don't have freedom and free market doesn't work at all.
Obviously this is a YC forum and many people have a startup bias, but I'm nowhere near that scene. Many startups do even worse things than some of the big guys, because they aspire to become them. The "burn investor money to get market share at a loss, kill all competition, become a monopoly, then enshittify and make infinite money" strategy wouldn't be nearly as effective if we had proper antitrust enforcement.
I said sort-of because the economics of this is more complicated. Investors lose their preferences when they sell in an IPO, so this is probably better for common stock holders.
I don’t think 19.3 B is their current market cap, it’s only what was sold at the IPo. Anyway, 19.3 instead of 20 would have been no big deal IMO
Adobe certainly lost money, because they have had to compete against the better product, so have been able to charge less for their own offering. And will presumably continue to do so until further notice.
Any employees who would have been swiftly laid off after the acquisition should certainly be glad for this outcome. They still have jobs, and if there are layoffs after the IPO it will be less dramatic. If they had equity, they probably got a much better deal in an IPO, especially if they sold some of it off after the “pop”.