[HN Gopher] Figma files for proposed IPO
___________________________________________________________________
Figma files for proposed IPO
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
Author : kualto
Score : 493 points
Date : 2025-07-01 19:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.figma.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.figma.com)
| pm90 wrote:
| From the adobe disaster to this. I am glad Adobe didn't snuff
| them out. Cheers and congrats to ... fig-mates? : )
| nipponese wrote:
| They did collect a $1B kill fee.
| zombot wrote:
| Let's hope it's not the start of enshittification.
| pixxel wrote:
| If you're tired of it all, and the inevitable, and you have
| agency, try penpot.app
| rglover wrote:
| Also Sketch [1]. Everyone abandoned it when Figma became the
| pOpUlAr tool, but I still use it every day, nearly 15 years
| later and it's continued to improve.
|
| [1] https://sketch.com
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I never switched away from Sketch for personal use. Figma's
| collab tools are great, but I find it somewhat clunky for
| usage beyond prototyping (such as creating image assets).
|
| Figma's cloud-first nature never also sat well with me... I
| still have the source PSD files for my earliest works from 25
| years ago, which can still be viewed and edited perfectly.
| Will that be true of my Figma documents in 25 years? It's not
| even a question with Sketch.
| aegypti wrote:
| Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
| giacaglia wrote:
| Its S-1 shows $70M held in Bitcoin ETFs, and board approval for
| another $30M BTC purchase via USDC!
|
| https://x.com/tier10k/status/1940133141546770454
| cluckindan wrote:
| Oh, so that's why they're taking it public: they are turning
| the company into a crypto investment fund which just happens to
| provide a SaaS design tool.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| It's the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because
| they are going public for the meme stock value.
| boredatoms wrote:
| Thats pretty weird, you'd think they would offload things like
| that to not spook investors
| nipponese wrote:
| It says more about Bitcoin than it does Figma.
| diggan wrote:
| > they would offload things like that to not spook investors
|
| Judging by the amount of fairly traditional companies holding
| Bitcoins, it would seem like holding Bitcoin is no longer
| spooky. I guess it makes sense when the financial environment
| is slowly turning into one without any regulations, Bitcoin
| will thrive in that sort of market.
| btown wrote:
| They don't link to the Form S-1 prospectus from their
| announcement, but it's publicly available at
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579878/000162828025...
|
| Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY
| revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin.
|
| It's an incredible success story, and the engineering they did
| upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the
| stage for their success is the stuff of legends.
| https://madebyevan.com/figma/ has links to numerous blog posts
| breaking it down, but here are some choice quotes:
|
| > [Evan] developed the hybrid C++/JavaScript architecture for
| Figma's editor that made it possible to build a best-in-class
| design tool in the browser. The document representation and
| canvas area is in C++ while the UI around the canvas is in
| JavaScript (the team eventually settled on TypeScript + React for
| this). This let us heavily optimize the document representation
| to reduce memory usage and improve editing speed while still
| using modern UI technologies for fast iteration on our UI. C++
| development was done using Xcode (not in the browser) to provide
| a better debugging environment.
|
| > Even though the contents of Figma documents are similar to what
| HTML can display, Figma actually does all of its own document
| rendering for cross-browser consistency and performance. Figma
| uses WebGL for rendering which bypasses most of the browser's
| HTML rendering pipeline and lets the app work closely with the
| graphics card. The rendering engine handles curve rendering,
| images, blurs, masking, blending, and opacity groups, and
| optimizes for high visual fidelity.
|
| > [Evan] developed Figma's multiplayer syncing protocol, worked
| on the initial version of the multiplayer live collaboration
| service (a kind of specialized real-time database), and added
| multiplayer syncing support to Figma's existing editing
| application. The initial version was written in TypeScript but
| [he] later ported it to Rust for improved performance and
| stability.
|
| It's a great reminder that it's not premature optimization if
| your UI's fluidity is your distinctive feature and your calling
| card! And the business acumen to turn this into such a wildly
| successful product in the context of competitors with kitchen-
| sink feature lists can't be understated, either. I have an
| incredible amount of respect for this team, and they should
| inspire all of us to tackle ambitious projects.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| I was one of their first Enterprise customers way back in
| 2017'ish-give-or-take.
|
| The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for
| real time collaboration. Which was god send from the Sketch ->
| Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) 'stack' that
| lost Enterprise design orgs were using.
|
| Which was already a large leap from what Adobe was expecting us
| to do with Photoshop/Illustrator (after they depreciated
| Fireworks).
|
| Figma made handoff much easier. Made version control dead
| simple. Made my life as a UX leader much much better. I
| remembered talking to a few now-Gigantic companies back then
| and we all plotted the move together
|
| It wasn't lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother with
| its usage of Mac OS's native shape rendering. It's just that
| the benefits far outweighed the small drop in snappiness.
|
| And for anyone who's going to say "Sketch was Mac only that's
| why it failed!" I assure you that had nothing to do with it.
| For the same reasons an entire generation of UX/UI designers
| stopped using Axure. But we would need to start talking about
| Invision 7 and Invision Studio if you wanted to get into the
| nitty gritty.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > It wasn't lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother
| with its usage of Mac OS's native shape rendering. It's just
| that the benefits far outweighed the small drop in
| snappiness.
|
| yep, even though i personally prefer sketch, if i was running
| a company i'd most likely go with figma as well because of
| the collaborative capabilities; its just a huge productivity
| boost for collaborative teams
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Plus then designers, devs and stakeholders can participate
| on any OS they wish to use. Which, at least to me, is still
| important.
| andrekandre wrote:
| thats the biggest one probably; saw it firsthand at a
| large company that was using sketch but managers and
| others using windows or devs on linux wanted to see the
| designs for work and nobody was gonna change to mac for
| that so figma it was...
| ericrosedev wrote:
| After the Adobe/Figma deal fell through a few years ago I
| thought they might breath new life into XD, it's a good
| program that integrates with your Creative Cloud libraries.
| No idea why they've put it on ice, especially without Figma.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| The perception at the time was that Adobe had abandoned UX
| designers and wasn't willing to tailor any of their tools
| to them. So they (we) moved on.
|
| I was at a SXSW session with XD's product team in the early
| weeks/months of that products existence. The Q&A section
| was filled with a lot of dismissive statements and
| questions. XD was never going to survive.
| latexr wrote:
| > And for anyone who's going to say "Sketch was Mac only
| that's why it failed!"
|
| Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and
| (presumably) well. Apple themselves continue to officially
| release design files for Sketch with every OS release. They
| share more resources for Sketch than any other app, including
| Figma and Photoshop.
|
| http://developer.apple.com/design/resources/
|
| > after they depreciated Fireworks
|
| I've been seeing that word used a lot in this context, so
| just wanted to point out (I'd appreciate if someone did the
| same for me) that what you mean is "deprecated" (no "i"), as
| depreciating is a different thing.
| diggan wrote:
| > Why would anyone say that? Sketch is still alive and
| (presumably) well
|
| When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what
| they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their
| perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black and
| white than the average person.
|
| With that said, Sketch certainly didn't become _more_
| popular because the macOS requirement even for viewing the
| files. I remember that there was some hacks to be able to
| at least view them on Linux, and other things like Zepplin
| (or similar) made it even easier, but it was still
| cumbersome.
|
| Then Figma appeared, offered more or less the same
| features, slightly worse performance than Sketch, but
| worked absolutely everywhere and was easy to open and
| inspect things for everyone on the team. Obviously, Figma
| ate a lot of the Sketch user-base, which is something I saw
| in multiple companies myself.
| latexr wrote:
| > When people deep into the startup-woods say "Fail" what
| they really mean is "Didn't take over the world". Their
| perspective of "winning / failing" is a bit more black
| and white than the average person.
|
| Good point (also, "deep into the startup-woods" is a
| great way to put it). I suspect there's a major overlap
| between those people and the ones who are obsessed with
| products "killing" another. The same kind of people who
| are hyped by any new shiny pebble as if it's the second
| coming of Christ and immediately eschew everything which
| came before. The people who are so blind to context they
| shouted "zOMG Google is dead because of ChatGPT" because
| they were incapable of thinking for two seconds that
| Google has a ton of cash to survive in the long run, were
| already leading research in the field, and (of course)
| wouldn't just fold their arms and stay still. In short,
| people not worth listening to.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| This is 1 part hilarious and 1 part bewildering. You
| wrote an entire silly imaginary novel about my life based
| on a poorly worded (to your standards) sentence.
|
| Sketch dominated the landscape. Now they are a small
| percentage of the landscape. I characterized that as a
| 'fail'. Sure, maybe an inexact word but what else do you
| call going from 60%+ of the market share down to below
| 20%? And btw I currently pay Sketch $120 for a personal
| license (so they obviously haven't failed in that sense).
|
| And spare me the 'context' thing. Because my context on
| this subject is as a individual contributor, leader of
| multiple large design orgs with dozens of designers all
| in the same tools, as an early Sketch, Figma, Invision
| and Framer X customer. The context is up there with the
| Console Wars but I don't have the room for that here.
|
| What's your context?
|
| Have a great day!
| latexr wrote:
| Er, my friend, you utterly misunderstood my comment. I
| wasn't thinking about you _at all_ when I wrote that (I
| didn't have _any_ individual in mind, just an
| amalgamation of opinions I've seen shared in multiple
| places). Why would I? The way I understood (and replied)
| to your original comment, you _weren't_ one of the people
| saying Sketch had failed. I was supporting and continuing
| your point, not refuting it, though now I understand you
| were indeed agreeing with your imaginary users saying
| Sketch failed but disagreeing with their imaginary
| reasons. My bad, I misunderstood that about your
| argument.
|
| But if you felt attacked, that is entirely on you. It
| wasn't at all my intention, and my comment is pretty
| clearly a continuation of what the other user said, which
| in my view also didn't attack anyone specifically. Yours
| was one of the strangest and most unexpected responses I
| got in recent memory, and it took me a bit to even
| understand why you were so mad and thumping your chest.
| Hilarious and bewildering indeed.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| People say it all of the time. Go onto any other platform
| discussing this topic and you'll see it as the most cited
| reason for Figma's dominance.
|
| Yes, Sketch's logo has been featured in a Apple keynote
| before. I'm familiar with their relationship with Apple and
| it seems like their team is perfectly happy not being the
| gargantuan that Figma is.
|
| Sometimes I feel like people just want to find any reason
| to disagree on here.
|
| Lastly, maybe you should just make a depreciation (sic)
| bot.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Of course we would say that, with the exception of my
| current employer, and I am approaching 50 years, no one
| else has used Apple gear on the office, designers working
| at my previous employers had to put up with Windows if
| they wanted a job, and I can vouch we always had plenty
| of candidates looking for one.
| ichik wrote:
| > It wasn't lost on us that Sketch is/was much much smoother
| with its usage of Mac OS's native shape rendering.
|
| Writing this from the perspective of someone who used to
| spend all day every day in Photoshop/Sketch/Figma for
| decades. This markedly contradicts my recollection of the
| state of Sketch at the time Figma was in its first public
| beta. Sketch's performance was abhorrent and it was
| constantly crashing while working with libraries. I was very
| skeptical about web-technology based tool in terms of
| performance, but Figma blew me away. It was FAST.
| rudi-c wrote:
| There's definitely others that shared your perspective. A
| commonly cited reason of early Figma adopters was that they
| felt it was faster than Sketch.
|
| Of course, the reality was that performance is a super
| nuanced thing. It's always measured in relation to specific
| things, but ultimately summarized via a "feeling".
|
| Aspects of performance include:
|
| - Loading a (blank/medium/large) file from
| (scratch/cache/etc)
|
| - Performance when editing (what?), panning, zooming (small
| or large doc?)
|
| - Performance with a large number of simple objects, or
| complex objects (components? variables? nested components?
| drop shadows/background blurs?)
|
| I haven't personally done some performance comparisons
| between the two apps since ~2018 but at the time there were
| definitely things where Figma was noticeably faster than
| sketch, a lot of things that were comparable, some things
| that were slower. My own very biased feeling was that Figma
| was faster more often than not but it's always up to the
| individual use case, how their file is setup, what they are
| doing within that file, and how they mentally weigh those
| different scenarios.
|
| I definitely didn't feel like being on the web was a
| limiting factor. In some theoretical state, with infinite
| resources to optimize everything, native could be faster
| since you have access to lower-level APIs. In practice,
| that's the same argument as "it could be faster in hand-
| written assembly". Almost never did we get to the point
| where we'd use those abilities even if we had them, due to
| their cost on development and impact on the
| correctness/maintainability of the code.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Don't forget the incredible lock in Figma has in the design
| space.
|
| Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall
| Street quarterly.
|
| Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious
| nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire
| product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is
| satisfied.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease
| Wall Street quarterly
|
| Aren't designers mad at Adobe for doing exactly this?
| esskay wrote:
| Yup, Figma is likely to become the next Adobe. Shareholders
| are vastly more important than consumers as we all sadly
| know.
| rcleveng wrote:
| Yes. Now you can offer something similiar for less than $55
| per seat per month, then to quote Bezos: "your margin is my
| opportunity".
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I'm in a monthly meetup with designers (not randos, these are
| typically people who are known in the industry), and half the
| time is spent shitting on Figma. It's not necessarily the
| quality of their design product, it's the business model and
| their general focus as a company.
|
| There are several things designers need that Figma has
| dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release
| them, they're usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they
| don't release them at all, instead opting to build some
| horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a
| bigger TAM.
|
| Figma has the power of the network effect at present, but you
| can only charge people to use _variables_ for so long before
| they look for an alternative.
| spooky_action wrote:
| I'm curious what the missing features are in Figma from a
| designers perspective. You've mentioned the paywalled
| variables, what else? (I haven't been a product engineer in
| years, and have barely touched Figma in the last ~5 years)
| andrecarini wrote:
| - Clunky component and variable system; inadequate for
| more complex stuff with lots of parameters.
|
| - Can't set connectors on Design files (used for
| documenting the navigation flow between different pages
| of an app).
|
| - You can set connectors on FigJam files, but if you want
| to bring your components from Design files then you can't
| keep the instances synchronised to the component
| definition. And you can't attach the connector endpoint
| to some element inside the Design component. It's
| essentially just an image export of the Design component.
|
| - Prototyping is very clunky and trying to build a flow
| that has elements reacting to interactions on other
| distinct elements is either variable hell or downright
| impossible.
|
| Those are just off the top of my mind. I'm always finding
| threads from 5 years ago on their community forums with
| loads of people on the same boat and no activity from
| Figma side.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Adding:
|
| - Poor typography support: can't embed fonts in files,
| can't tweak type enough (can't do faux italics for
| example)
|
| - Subpar file/project management: can't do things like
| nested folders which gets overwhelming with large
| projects/teams
|
| - Clunky version control: browsing long file histories is
| inefficient, the entire VCS UI is forced into a narrow
| sidebar
|
| Also just off the top of my mind. There's also lots more
| if you're coming from a print design world and are thus
| used to Adobe Illustrator.
| andrecarini wrote:
| > There's also lots more if you're coming from a print
| design world
|
| Ah, there's another one you just reminded me:
|
| - Poor paragraph justification algorithm; there's no
| hyphenation system.
|
| This one is table stakes for professional print design.
| 1zael wrote:
| Evan Wallace basically said screw it, I'm writing a custom
| WebGL renderer and multiplayer protocol, when everyone else was
| slapping together existing libraries. Most of us would have
| built a janky Electron app and called it a day. Instead they
| went nuclear on performance because that WAS their product
| differentiation.
| benatkin wrote:
| Hasn't he all but washed his hands of Figma? I have a hard
| time being interested in something that has such a painful
| freemium tier, tries to merge with Adobe, and trademarked
| "Dev Mode".
| geodel wrote:
| > Hasn't he all but washed his hands of Figma?
|
| Great. What's the point of achieving great things with hard
| work if one is still stuck working with same product for
| life.
|
| > I have a hard time being interested in something that has
| such a painful..
|
| Thats okay. One can always use products that are reasonable
| to their expense budget. Not every product is to be used by
| every one.
| trinix912 wrote:
| It's incredibly snappy. It works fine on subpar hardware like
| a late 2013 11" MacBook Air. Truly amazing.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| > The rendering engine handles curve rendering, images, blurs,
| masking, blending, and opacity groups, and optimizes for high
| visual fidelity.
|
| And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks
| great in figma but not in a real webpage
| cluckindan wrote:
| This, so much this.
|
| I've been thinking about a box-first approach to design
| tooling. The overall layout workflow would consist only of
| adding boxes (block-level elements) to a blank web page, or
| inside other boxes. Boxes could also contain other elements
| like inputs, buttons, images, etc.
| gffrd wrote:
| Huh?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Don't quite follow you, but if you're talking about a box-
| based layout for the web, that's a little overly simplistic
| as "the" layout, but is already possible. Keep in mind the
| historical underpinings; web documents were always more
| like scrolls than screens.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Not a layout, but a design tool like Figma, leveraging
| the default flow of elements.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Something like Webflow then?
| cluckindan wrote:
| Not really, I'm not thinking to replace CMS builders like
| Wix or Squarespace either.
|
| More like "no-code design directly in HTML and CSS", but
| with familiar Figma/Sketch-line controls for sizing,
| alignment, etc. Responsive by default, boxes full-width
| and vertically sized by content by default, manual pixel
| sizing of elements heavily discouraged in favor of
| block/inline-block/inline. Sane defaults for theme
| tokens, but easily customizable.
|
| In other words, a hands-on design tool for web layouts,
| working directly on the DOM and stylesheet, preferring
| the flow for positioning and leveraging (normalized)
| HTML/CSS defaults.
|
| My thinking is mostly born out of frustration with the
| performance of flexbox-inside-flexbox layouts and the
| total disparity of text layout between web and existing
| design tools.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| See https://every-layout.dev for a mind-blowingly well-
| thought-out approach to CSS that builds from first
| principles and leverages sane primitives and a typographic
| scale to compose dynamic layouts... it's boxes, and it's
| beautiful.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Now if it only was a design tool like Figma.
| gaws wrote:
| > See https://every-layout.dev for a mind-blowingly well-
| thought-out approach to CSS
|
| Is the book _that_ good?
| YZF wrote:
| Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack _and_
| designers need to worry less about things they can 't control
| and think more about usability and simplicity.
|
| I work on a large web based application, with designers, who
| use Figma. It's just too easy to lose the plot and come up
| with things that don't work well. Not because of Figma.
| Something about the balance between the software stack(s),
| the domain, the focus of designers today, the front end
| engineering, and product management is broken. It's
| interesting that Figma did (IMO) a great job at addressing
| the stack so they can build a product that does what they
| want it and then is used by so many to build products that
| don't always do what their customers want. Asking Figma to
| use the wrong stack for their product (which is what I'm
| reading between the lines) is not really the right answer...
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| > Maybe the real webpage also needs a better stack
|
| I'll call Google and I'm sure they'll get right on aligning
| their browser's rendering engine with figma's
| YZF wrote:
| Is this alignment _the_ issue with your application? Are
| there design alternatives that would be impacted less by
| some rendering engine differences?
|
| What about other browsers? Versions? Platforms? OS?
| Resolution/screen size? My huge frontend team can't
| handle this, even before we used Figma.
|
| Isn't the problem trying to get this "web platform" do
| something it was never meant to do? How would this be
| solved by Figma using a rendering engine that would grind
| their product to a halt?
|
| I'm old enough to have done a lot of native platform UI
| work, the web stack in many ways was a step backwards. It
| has obviously a lot of advantages (run anywhere) but in
| some ways it's more like IBM terminals on a mainframe vs.
| a native UI where you have full control. I (obviously)
| use and make web apps all the time, but they often suck,
| and this isn't Figma's fault.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I've been fighting the way figma interprets fonts for
| years. It's not too bad at my current company, but at my
| last company things would look great in figma but with
| the exact same styles applied they'd be wrong in every
| browser. That's the sort of thing people are complaining
| about here.
|
| I'm sure there's something fundamentally wrong with the
| font files. In both cases, they're not standard, widely
| available fonts. With that said, browsers render the
| fonts consistently with each other, but not Figma.
|
| There's also a lot of ways that figma can lead designers
| down the unhappy path. They'll put together two different
| screens that look great, wave their hands around the idea
| of "just make it responsive" and when you go in and look,
| there's nonsensical crap like absolute positioning on
| elements, or arrangements that don't work with block
| layouts and force you into convoluted grid stuff.
|
| Figma is clearly built to be useful for web development.
| It has tons of gaps that lead designers off the happy
| path. Take out all the "browsers / versions / os / screen
| size" differences from the argument; my points above
| would apply to any design tool built for any product. If
| it doesn't accurately reflect what is possible or how
| something is done, it's not a perfect fit.
|
| PS: I prefer figma over pretty much every other tool I've
| used. With that said, there's no pretending that it is
| perfect, nor any reason to deflect accurate criticism
| elsewhere.
| stevage wrote:
| My solution in these cases was to build prototype sites
| that sync in real time from the figma file. So the
| designer can see how their work actually looks, and treat
| the figma view as just a low fidelity preview.
| notpushkin wrote:
| This is _the_ way to go. Designers should sign off on
| products, not mockups.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| Could you point to any resources on how to achieve this?
| At work we're increasing our Figma usage, and this
| approach sounds like something better implemented sooner
| than later
| stevage wrote:
| Here's a tool I made.
|
| https://github.com/stamen/figmasset
| shove wrote:
| Stamen! One of the OGs at this point.
| tshaddox wrote:
| In my experience that's rarely due to low-level rendering
| differences, and almost always due to the Figma design not
| accommodating real-world data.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Designers complaining that their pixel perfect mockup in any
| software not aligning with layout in actual browsers is a
| literal decades old complaint.
| raincole wrote:
| So? Before Sketch/Figma got popular, designers had been
| literally passing .psd files as design specs around for a
| decade.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| While I like the product, the net income would worry me if I
| were to participate in the IPO. $280M net income in 2023 after
| they received $1B for the failed merger and $730M net loss
| because of RSU/Stock Awards in 2024 is not great when the total
| revenue for the company was $500M in 2023 and $750M in 2024.
| echelon wrote:
| They're about to get upstaged by AI too.
|
| Not because they can't be leaders in the space, but because
| there won't be any moat.
| hiphipjorge wrote:
| As a former figma engineer, let me be the first to say that
| Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's
| still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really
| understands that Evan wrote back in the day.
|
| One example of that is something like he adapted a shader we
| use internally to render font glyphs, which no one has touched
| ever since. The engineer who told me this had spent a few days
| trying to understand it and said (after having worked in this
| area for years) was stumped by it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| That's... not a screaming testimony, dude.
| timcobb wrote:
| > A true 100x-er
| op00to wrote:
| I don't mean this to throw shade, but isn't the whole point
| of writing code that someone else can understand it? I worked
| with some crazy smart people when I was in academia, and when
| one of them left it was not worth trying to maintain what
| they left behind because it was so often inscrutable.
| sowbug wrote:
| Even well-written code can be hard to understand --
| practically impossible, even -- if what it's doing is
| sufficiently complex. Cryptography and certain areas of
| graphics have humbled me, for instance. I followed the
| flow, and I appreciated the comments, but I did not
| understand.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Any specific lines you can point to as examples in an
| open source repo?
| com2kid wrote:
| Font rendering code is a nightmare because the problem is
| really damn hard. Font files are complex, and actual real
| world usage is even worse.
|
| Any code that involves parsing old school binary file
| formats is going to look ugly to modern day developers who
| are used to JSON everything, even if the code is actually
| very well structured.
| switz wrote:
| The reason to write code is to solve a problem. If the
| problem domain is complex, then the code to solve said
| problem will be inherently complex. He solved a problem.
| nicce wrote:
| I don't know anything about shaders and this is not personal
| against Evan, but if someone wrotes code that nobody
| understands, isn't it bad thing and not good thing? I thought
| similarly (admired) many years ago, that those people are
| wizards and that is cool, but the older I get, less I think
| so. You often can write the same thing so that it is also
| easier for others to understand. In most cases, when we talk
| about compiled languages, compiler optimises it anyway, if
| you use some extra variables and so on.
| Vanclief wrote:
| Exactly, I had the same issue when I was younger. I thought
| if I read code I could not understand was because the other
| dev was a legend. Now its the opposite, I am amazed by code
| that does its job well, its understandable and has low
| complexity.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| It's a bad thing if you make a simple thing more
| complicated than it needs to be.
|
| But there are plenty of Hard Problems out there, for which
| no sufficient code could be called "simple." Plenty of
| aspects of font rendering fall within this bucket. It's
| notoriously difficult.
| wbl wrote:
| Computer typography is a dark art. It requires
| understanding a whole domain with its own terminology and
| traditions as well as aesthetic sense, then combine that
| with the programming knowledge.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The first startup I worked at was in typography. Writing a
| full typographic rendering engine in webGL shaders is going
| to result in code that is difficult for others not
| experienced in webGL and typography.
|
| It's inherently (and likely irreducibly) difficult, not
| accidentally/gratuitously difficult.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's what I was thinking, but then, it is very
| specialized and high performance code well outside of my
| domains (font rendering, shaders, C++, high performance /
| frequently called code is very much not my bread and
| butter). I frequently glaze over whenever trying to read a
| post about some optimization problem. Fast inverse square
| root [0] is succinct and cleanly written even though it
| uses math symbols instead of variable names, but I have no
| idea how it works and don't have the math basics to even
| know when / where / why to use it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Usually it is dangerous to let such people write
| application level code, but according to the reports in
| the comments, the guy might be one of the few exceptions,
| who gets the low level right, but also created flexible
| extensible structure of code in other places, without it
| becoming obscure on the application level.
|
| Usually when I see some mathematical code that's not
| explained at all and has obvious flaws in terms of simple
| improvements that could be made to improve readability or
| even something as simple as some comments, I just keep
| thinking: "Please don't let this person touch application
| level code!"
| scott_w wrote:
| As others have pointed out: if the complexity is in the
| _domain_ then that 's perfectly acceptable. I always
| remember reading some lines of code in Linux that had a
| comment above them: "This code is meant to be read by a
| CPU, not by a human."
|
| The hard part is knowing when the code is complex because
| the domain/performance requirements demand it be that way
| vs when the code is complex because the engineer was just
| trying to appear smarter than they are.
| preommr wrote:
| > which no one has touched ever since. The engineer who told
| me this had spent a few days trying to understand it and said
| (after having worked in this area for years) was stumped by
| it.
|
| yikes
| isaacremuant wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from and the admiration for
| someone for whom no problem is seemingly impossible.
|
| I wouldn't glorify "brilliant code" that much though because
| code should be made to be changed. If it isn't, it's a
| fragility trait, not a positive trait. Code that no one knows
| how to change is opportunity lost.
|
| I do understand that it may be hard to create stuff for
| others when you're alone and going very fast but I don't
| think praising it is the right idea.
| safetytrick wrote:
| I don't think changeable code is the number one priority.
| The goal is to solve a problem and code that solves a
| problem without needing to change is sufficient.
|
| Code that doesn't need to change is a really good sign that
| you've got something good.
| rudi-c wrote:
| Font rendering is indeed complex, but the anecdote seems to
| be misleading readers into thinking Evan wrote obscure code.
|
| I worked extensively in the parts of the Figma where Evan
| wrote a lot of foundational code, and have also worked
| directly with him on building the plugin API.
|
| One of Evan's strong points as a CTO is that he was very
| pragmatic and that was reflected in his code. Things that
| could be simple were simple, things that needed complexity
| did not shy away from it.
|
| While all codebases have early decisions that later get
| changed, I'd say that largely speaking, Figma's editor
| codebase was built upon foundations that stood the test of
| time. This includes choices such as the APIs used to build
| product code, interact with multiplayer, the balance between
| using OOP v.s. more functional or JS-like patterns, the
| balance between writing code in C++/WASM v.s. JS, etc. Many
| of these choices can be credited to Evan directly or his
| influence.
|
| Subsequent engineers that joined were able to build upon the
| product without causing a spiraling mess of complexity thanks
| to those good decisions made early on. In my opinion, this is
| why Figma was able to ship complex new features without being
| bogged down by exploding tech debt, and a major contributing
| factor to the business's success as a whole.
| poiru wrote:
| +1 from another Figma engineer who happened to work on the
| text engine back in the day.
|
| I think that Evan generally wrote code that was as simple
| as possible -- there was no unnecessary complexity. In this
| case there indeed is some inherent, unavoidable complexity
| due to the math involved and the performance requirements,
| but otherwise I found our text rendering pipeline very
| understandable.
|
| Evan actually wrote about it if you're curious to learn
| more: https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-
| rendering...
| marhee wrote:
| It's a clever trick. But can it render a textured text?
| Transparent text, gradient fills? Maybe it can, I dont
| know. But why not just triangulate the glyph shapes, and
| represent each glyph as a set of triangles. This
| triangulation can be done offline, making rendering very
| lightweight.
| poiru wrote:
| The linked post was about Evan's side project, but within
| Figma, all of that is indeed possible. The glyphs are
| transformed into vector networks[0], which has a fill
| pipeline that supports transparency, gradients, images,
| blending, masking, etc.
|
| [0]: https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-vector-
| networks/
| mattmanser wrote:
| It is incredible how easy this stuff spirals out of control
| and why I'm not too worried about AI yet.
|
| Every now and then I'm writing a PoC or greenfield project
| that you put down for 6 months. And sometimes when I pick
| it up to extend it, it will just so rapidly feel like it's
| getting out of control (I'm actually listening to the
| chemical brothers song of the same name at the moment!). I
| can at least usually fix that with some refactoring, but
| why didn't I get it right at the time? I don't know.
|
| And it's often hard to figure out why, what architectural
| decision did you make to cause this. Pointing at the
| particular interface or pattern or method call chain that
| is the cause of a ton of complexity that could be fixed is
| much, much, much harder than most jobs in programming. And
| beyond the ability of 90% of developers.
|
| The -2000 story popped up here again recently
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252), and it's
| of the same vein, why had no-one else done that? Because it
| takes extreme skill to simplify existing code. It's beyond
| most developers.
|
| I think it's why we as an industry often obsess about
| things like space/tabs/semi-colons or not/etc. They're
| obvious improvements to an architecture, and everyone can
| join in. But really, they're a small improvement to a
| codebase, not a massive one.
|
| And then you get the Evans of the world who just do it,
| almost effortlessly. I've worked with an Evan, and
| sometimes you'd look at his code and think "why?", but any
| attempt to change or improve it invariably made it worse.
| He'd picked that pattern or structure or method call chain
| and it was always the right choice. And after a day of
| poking at it, exploring the edges, trying to change it,
| you'd realize why.
|
| And yes, sometimes the code was so complex other developers
| couldn't get it. And then they'd call me over to help
| because I could get it. And I'd look at it and realize it
| was complicated because it had to be like that. He'd
| actually done it in the simplest way possible.
|
| And years later I still make the wrong choice sometimes,
| and I always think of Simon and wish I had his magic touch.
|
| Even if he used to name functions Thing() and DoStuff() and
| forget to update them.
| Mtinie wrote:
| That it works is testimony to the intelligence put towards
| the code. That no one else can grep it tells me it was solved
| in a manner which was suboptimal.
|
| I cannot believe Figma hired engineers who could not follow
| along already-tread footsteps. That's a nonsensical
| assertion. Novel code may be inscrutable but the problem-
| solving and techniques should have been clear and repeatable
| by those who follow, even if they require adaptation.
| sizzle wrote:
| Do you think AI could take a crack at understanding it for
| you?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Wouldn't know until we try it; I have a suspicion AI would
| struggle with "rare" code snippets though, given there's
| not much online like it.
| latexr wrote:
| The way you're telling it, that feels like a really weird
| thing to praise. "There are majorly important parts of the
| code base with a bus factor of one" isn't something to
| celebrate or be proud of.
| scary-size wrote:
| IIRC a few folks from Mapbox joined Figma years ago. They
| probably know their way around font rendering in WebGL
| (unsigned distance fields et al.).
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Wait, so no one asked Evan to explain the code? Something
| smells fishy.
| eviks wrote:
| > team eventually settled on ... React
|
| How the legends have fallen
| yanis_t wrote:
| Don't forget that Evan is the author of esbuild[1], which
| started a wave, eventually resulted in 10x performance
| improvements in frontend tooling, and even recent TypeScript
| rewrite to go[2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/evanw/esbuild [2]
| https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go
| OuterVale wrote:
| I think you're confusing esbuild with ESLint. ESLint was
| created by Nicholas C Zakas.
| yanis_t wrote:
| Fixed it, thanks for noticing.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Evanw is the 100x developer
| highfrequency wrote:
| Thanks for sharing - this architecture post is also a great
| read: https://madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-
| design-...:
|
| > Our vision for the future of design tools is one where both
| the tool and the content are easily available to anyone,
| anywhere
|
| > The reason this is hard is because the web wasn't designed as
| a general-purpose computing platform.
|
| > We fully control memory layout and can use compact 32-bit
| floats or even bytes when appropriate instead of JavaScript's
| 64-bit doubles...The generated code is completely in control of
| allocation, which makes it much easier to hit 60fps by avoiding
| GC pauses. All C++ objects are just reserved ranges in a pre-
| allocated typed array so the JavaScript GC is never involved.
|
| > One big issue for us was that certain browser configurations
| couldn't allocate large ranges of continuous address space for
| the huge typed array that contains the entire emscripten memory
| space. The worst case was 32-bit Chrome on Windows which
| sometimes couldn't even allocate a 256mb typed array because
| ASLR was fragmenting the address space. This has since been
| fixed.
|
| A great example of making a single bold architectural decision
| (building a design tool on the web instead of as an app) in
| service of a vision (prioritize live collaboration), and then
| thoughtfully resolving all of the performance tradeoffs that
| stem from this route.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| RE: the webgl being used to render a site thing - I'd always
| thought this should be done so that we can use a nice, clean
| grid co-ord system same as iOS/Android, etc.
|
| None of this "designed for newspaper print" style layout. Yes,
| I know flexbox is very good. But it's still a hack (imo).
| dang wrote:
| We've added that link to the text at the top. Thanks!
| system2 wrote:
| When they go IPO, will you guys buy it immediately, expecting it
| to go up? Curious what people think about the figma's future.
| diegof79 wrote:
| Point of view as a Figma user...
|
| With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period.
|
| Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or
| failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with
| the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and
| Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the
| evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to
| Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall).
| What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive
| engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team.
|
| The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to
| capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very
| similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight
| integration with Figma could help them leverage their current
| subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers.
| Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI
| coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many
| designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they
| are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting
| market.
|
| The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much,
| trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with
| Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing,
| which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma
| Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may
| not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint
| or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev
| process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't
| resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable
| features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love,
| and the prototyping options are still limited.
|
| The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools,
| they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch
| is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma.
| Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is
| a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools
| I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Looks like I got access to it riiiiiiiight as they're gonna start
| gutting themselves to pay for retirement and pension funds.
| Awesome!
| colesantiago wrote:
| So now that Figma will be owned by Wall Street, it will only get
| considerably worse from here. It is now time consider and find
| and fund open source alternatives.
|
| I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?
| cluckindan wrote:
| I agree. If they're so profitable already, why take the company
| public at all?
| bdangubic wrote:
| to be a lot more profitable
| cluckindan wrote:
| And how would that happen? They already have the product,
| which can be sold in huge numbers without really needing to
| scale operations. Are you suggesting they need cash to
| rewrite or improve the product?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Because there are likely many employees and investors who
| want to cash out.
|
| Going public makes their shares liquid. It's (probably) not
| reasonable for the company to repurchase that equity or to
| pay employees pure cash comp.
| atombender wrote:
| At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design
| tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma
| counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features
| are just as good, and sometimes better. They have a decent
| desktop Electron app that wraps it, too.
| rvz wrote:
| Very predictable outcome: [0] [1]
|
| Now prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of
| people looking for Figma alternatives.
|
| The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the
| public markets on retail.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533826
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34920968
| jonator wrote:
| Reminds me of the Linear story. You can disrupt a set of
| established players by focusing on simplicity, opinionated
| design, and maximum performance via hardcore engineering.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Going public is usually terrible news for users.
|
| That said, today it's an incredibly good design tool - worth
| checking out before shareholders start the enshittification
| process. Congrats to the devs / founders for making it all the
| way to an IPO!
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| [flagged]
| Zealotux wrote:
| Figma's enshittification started back when there were talks of
| Adobe taking over, it's already bloated beyond reason.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS.
|
| But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I find it kind of ridiculous that I need dev mode to get some
| values that they expose outside of dev mode but in a less dev
| friendly way. I know there's more to it, but come on...
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Beyond Penpot and Excalidraw, check out Sketch (Mac-only but
| mature), Lunacy (offline-capable), and Plasmic (code-focused) -
| all with different trade-offs but less pressure to monetize
| aggressively.
| granzymes wrote:
| Headline financials: FY Ended December 31, in
| millions except percentage | 2023 |
| 2024 | YoY ---------------|--------|--------|-------
| revenue | $505 | $749 | 48% gross profit |
| $460 | $661 | 44% op ex | $534 | $1,539 |
| 118% net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)% free
| cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)%
| VoidWhisperer wrote:
| What happened in 2024 that caused their operating expenses to
| increase so much?
| granzymes wrote:
| Mostly a 356% increase in R&D: FY Ended
| December 31, in millions except percentage
| | 2023 | 2024 | YoY
| ---------------------------|------|------|------
| research and development | $165 | $751 | 356%
| sales and marketing | $201 | $472 | 134%
| general and administrative | $168 | $316 | 88%
|
| And most of that increase came from a one-time charge from
| allowing employees to sell their RSUs. While not a cash cost
| for Figma, it was booked as an expense and allocated as
| follows: | 2024
| ---------------------------|------ cost of revenue
| | $25 research and development | $463
| sales and marketing | $187 general and
| administrative | $184 total |
| $858
|
| If you subtract the one-time charge, you get:
| | 2023 | 2024 (adj.) | YoY
| ---------------------------|------|-------------|------
| research and development | $165 | $288 | 75%
| sales and marketing | $201 | $285 | 42%
| general and administrative | $168 | $132 | (21)%
| total | $534 | $705 | 32%
| dustypotato wrote:
| How'd you manage to summarize these figures so nicely ? Are
| you good at accounting stuff or are you using some AI tool
| ?
| granzymes wrote:
| Manual labor, going back to before LLMs were a thing. I
| just like reading S-1s.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27701617#27702669
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26362443#26363190
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143334#25143800
| drexlspivey wrote:
| They received a $1B termination fee in 2023 when their
| acquisition by Adobe collapsed. They would be losing money in
| 2023 otherwise
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Initially Tepid about AI. Didn't want to upset their base
| like Adobe was (seemingly) doing. Look at that year's Figcon
| for evidence. The keynote led with the new Figma, front
| loaded anything. He quickly moved past it and spent 90% of
| the rest of the time on non-consequential features.
|
| Then that AI feature they highlighted was pulled off
| production because it was cloning iOS.
|
| The AI heavy product dump we just got are lessons from that
| time.
| jonas21 wrote:
| In May 2024, they removed some of the vesting conditions on
| RSUs so employees could sell shares in a secondary offering.
|
| From an accounting perspective, it was an $800 million stock-
| based compensation expense, though it didn't really cost
| Figma anything.
| v5v3 wrote:
| If they were planning to IPO, they will have put in place a
| strategy to maximise the numbers for the year prior.
|
| So the numbers for the year before IPO may have no relation
| to future.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a president-for-life clause:
|
| _" Immediately following the completion of this offering, and
| assuming no exercise of the underwriters' over-allotment option,
| Dylan Field, our Chair of our Board of Directors, Chief Executive
| Officer, and President will hold or have the ability to control
| approximately % of the voting power of our outstanding capital
| stock, including % of the voting power pursuant to the Wallace
| Proxy. As a result, following this offering, Mr. Field will have
| the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our
| stockholders for approval, including the election of our
| directors and the approval of any change of control
| transaction."_
| mattmaroon wrote:
| That generally makes me more inclined to invest as I find that
| the biggest problem with a lot of public companies is they
| manage to Wall Street which means putting the short term over
| the long term, and those are often at odds with each other.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Short term focus is not a control issue it's a fact of life
| with public ownership. They still need to manage to market
| expectations or they will be punished, now one person can do
| whatever it takes to stay focused on only the next 2
| quarters.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It's not really punishment if you don't care what your
| share price is. A lower share price doesn't hurt a company
| unless perhaps they are trying to do a secondary offering
| or something.
|
| It does, however, hurt the Wall Street investors. If they
| have enough power to do so, they will replace the CEO if a
| share price is too low for too long.
|
| That's what creates the short term incentive that is a
| trouble and a lot of public companies. If the CEO has
| control of the voting shares, that pressure is relieved.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| There are a whole lot of companies that are run to benefit
| their management and not their shareholders. At best, they
| might be making no money but keeping a bunch of people in
| work.
|
| There's a good reason public shareholders historically
| demanded accountability - maybe it's fine for now, but all it
| takes is some management that you can't kick out, paying
| themselves extortionate salaries and driving the company into
| the ground at the same time to recognise the problems with
| "owning" a company you have no right to actually control (via
| replacing management and so on)
| teitoklien wrote:
| SEC and most states like delaware where companies
| incorporate do have minority shareholder protections,
| regardless of these terms.
|
| A board of directors can screw shareholders even without
| one controlling director.
|
| The protections for minority shareholder are seperate.
|
| Also the news of malpractice by directors like you mention
| leads to SEC investigations and stocks come crashing down
| before they can sell it (as they must declare their stock
| sales a few days before doing it)
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Given cases like Elon moving to less protective
| jursidictions, those protections are not necessarily as
| protective as you might prefer, especially if you sign
| them away at some point in the past.
|
| It's going to be a lot harder to protect your rights,
| especially around the margins, if you agree to terms like
| the above.
| zenonu wrote:
| The alternative is enshittification of the entire product
| lineup to include ads, exorbitant subscription prices,
| reduced functionality along a painful price gradient,
| morphing into a dopamine social product, or a goal to rent
| real-life assets for to an increasingly impoverished
| population. Pee in your piss bottle while delivering that
| Amazon package until we can figure out how to automate your
| job away too. The shareholders demand it!
| msgodel wrote:
| It's actually a crime in the US not to manage a public
| company in the interest of the shareholders. (There was a
| large case which Ford lost establishing the way this is
| interpreted now which many people argue is why it gets
| interpreted in such a shortsighted way so often although
| personally I'm not sure.)
|
| It makes sense, you're disposing of the capital the
| shareholders own.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| No, it isn't a crime.
|
| Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. was a civil case, not a criminal
| case. And it was in the Michigan Supreme Court so has no
| standing in the other 49 states.
|
| And in practice the "business judgement rule" makes it
| very easy for businesses to do whatever they want as long
| as they have a vaguely plausible explanation for how it
| helps the business as a whole. ("We need to buy a private
| jet for our CEO because he is integral to our growth and
| success.")
| mattmaroon wrote:
| There are certainly downsides to it, but you'll notice that
| most of the biggest companies of the last 20 years had a
| dual class stock structure that gives the founders a high
| level of control.
|
| The most efficient government is a benevolent dictatorship,
| the problem, of course is that benevolent dictators don't
| live forever and sooner or later you get a non-benevolent
| one.
|
| These sorts of dual class share structures avoid that issue
| by generally becoming common stock on transfer so it turns
| into a democracy with the end of the dictator.
|
| With an IPO you at least got to spend several years seeing
| how the dictator did.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| This is what they call "a W"
| Kye wrote:
| What Figma did in this era of anticompetitive buyouts is
| admirable but my mind will always think figma balls even after
| they IPO freely.
|
| Anyway, congratulations to everyone at Figma and good luck.
| urda wrote:
| Don't forget how Figma bullied Loveable from being able to use
| "dev mode" [1].
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/15/figma-sent-a-cease-and-
| des...
| nipponese wrote:
| Don't forget how Loveable used the moment as an acquisition
| tactic, which was probably the whole point.
| designerarvid wrote:
| That's how trademark works. You lose it if you have it and
| don't protect it.
| Sephr wrote:
| I think the point the parent comment is making is that
| companies shouldn't be able to trademark common phrases with
| their usual spelling. 'Dev mode' is a common short form for
| 'developer mode' which has extensive use.
| jonatron wrote:
| I wrote a little about it, because it's more complicated
| than "a trademark":
| https://jonatron.github.io/randomstuff/trademark/fig.html
| lvl155 wrote:
| Figma is an incredible product but I don't like what they're
| doing with AI. They should focus on enabling UI/UX designers to
| do more instead of making a glorified Dreamweaver.
| ojosilva wrote:
| So, this is a cash out before AI or AI-first solutions out do
| Figma?
|
| Seriously, are people starting to replace Figma with just basic
| LLM or simpler LLM-based solutions? I'm just trying to
| understand the timing of the IPO and the market. We used to use
| Figma, but dropped it as first phases of product design loop
| ended. Basic LLM does not feel there yet, but it does feel like
| it could be there very quickly.
| greatgib wrote:
| To me, an IPO by them at this moment let me think that they know
| that they are on top of the wave and that it is better to cash-in
| before growth starts to stale.
|
| They got a huge influx of users when image editing AI started to
| be a thing, I'm not quite sure that they haven't already
| conquered most of new users that could join them.
| pm90 wrote:
| Could be. It also could be that they feel comfortable raising
| money in the public markets for expansion, and to reward/retain
| their organization. We don't really know if they tried doing a
| databricks or a stripe and raise billions in the private
| market, maybe they did, maybe they found there's more upside in
| an IPO...
| andybak wrote:
| And the cycle continues. Who's working on the "Figma but not
| enshittified" at the moment?
| Lalabadie wrote:
| Penpot is the most solid alternative I know of at the moment.
| esskay wrote:
| And can be self hosted which is a massive plus!
| diggan wrote:
| With the biggest differentiator being that in Penpot,
| everything is a SVG/Open Standards, which for us web folks is
| a neat addition. Also developed by a local company in Spain,
| go Spain! And for the nerds, it's open source and built using
| ClojureScript :)
| rco8786 wrote:
| Honestly the cycle continuing is a breath of fresh air relative
| to the AI-ification of our entire industry.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Congrats to the team here. Let it be a lesson for anyone worried
| that "their idea has been taken" or "there already solutions for
| this" out there.
| mettamage wrote:
| Actually, that's a fair point! Thanks for making it :)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this downplays what they've actually built. Their technology is
| first-mover and incredibly impressive in the enterprise app
| space, and they've built a big business around it.
| rco8786 wrote:
| That was certainly not my intention. Nothing but respect for
| what they've built. Only pointing out that they entered a
| crowded space that already had "winners" in it, and
| succeeded.
| latexr wrote:
| Except it was not a crowded space. They did a bunch of
| stuff no one else was (or is) doing right from the start.
| Being entirely in the browser, real-time collaboration,
| vector networks...
| virgilp wrote:
| You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow
| it down enough. That was the point really, they entered a
| crowded space & re-defined it with their offering.
| latexr wrote:
| > You can define any space as "not crowded" if you narrow
| it down enough.
|
| I mean, you're technically correct1 but that's not
| exactly helpful because the inverse is also true: You can
| define any space as "crowded" if you widen it enough.
|
| That is to say it is perfectly plausible I am wrong and
| the space _was_ crowded, but that argument doesn't really
| prove or disprove it.
|
| > That was the point really, they entered a crowded space
| & re-defined it with their offering.
|
| Especially if you allow someone in the space to redefine
| it. At that point all bets are off and anyone can claim
| anything.
|
| 1 The best kind of correct:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo
| rco8786 wrote:
| You are confusing technology for product.
|
| The product space they entered, UX design tooling, was
| very crowded. Sketch and InVision were the kings and
| there were a dozen other reasonable options to choose
| from (including ones in browser with real time collab and
| other interesting tech).
|
| Figma entered that market later and won on a combination
| of technology and product innovation aka execution.
|
| But they absolutely entered a crowded market.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Let it be a lesson for anyone worried that "their idea has
| been taken" or "there already solutions for this" out there.
|
| I have nothing but respect for Figma's tech, but I'm not really
| sure this lesson is generalizable to 99.9% of other people. By
| all accounts Evan Wallace has skills and talent the _vast_
| majority of software developers don 't have and never will
| have. The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is
| that their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls
| of software development.
|
| And to emphasize, that's one reason I'm very happy for Figma's
| success. Figma didn't succeed because they "got lucky", or just
| happened to be in the right place at the right time, or had
| great marketing. They succeeded because they were able to
| create a brilliant technical solution to a problem that lesser
| engineers and engineering teams were simply not able to solve.
| seanclayton wrote:
| > The reason Figma was able to succeed in this space is that
| their engineering team was like the 90s-era Chicago Bulls of
| software development.
|
| Huge contracts are built to extract as much wealth from the
| customer as possible without letting the victim know. Not by
| engineering talent. Huge contracts are what make Figma a
| success story.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That's such an unfair, pessimistic, and "economics-free"
| take. The giant enterprises with "huge contracts" as you
| point out are not "victims" - it's not like they're hapless
| newbies who don't know how enterprise contracts work.
| Especially in the case of Figma, where there are loads of
| competitive products (which was the point of the comment I
| was responding to), clients have plenty of other options.
| They chose and continue to choose Figma because they
| believe it gives them value over other possibilities.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi
| billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of
| other things
| rco8786 wrote:
| Yea I'm not trying to take away from any of that, nor provide
| generalized advice. Only addressing the crowd of people who
| will shy away from pursuing (or poo poo others) when their
| idea isn't some sort of original innovation that nobody's
| ever thought of before.
|
| Every successful company had some sort of edge. Some sort of
| advantage that other companies in the space don't have. For
| Figma that was high level tech execution. For something like,
| say, LaunchDarkly, that was a killer enterprise sales team.
| For something like Liquid Death, it was pure marketing and
| positioning. Just to use some other examples of companies
| that launched into crowded spaces and succeeded.
|
| It could be anything, but it's always something, and no
| advice should be generalized.
| robenkleene wrote:
| The missing piece that this perspective leaves out is that
| Figma's success is at least partially due to timing of the rise
| of flat design. I wrote about this in my analysis of software
| transitions, here's the relevant section
| (https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-
| transitions...):
|
| > In the section on Photoshop to Sketch, we discussed an
| underappreciated factor in Sketch's, and by extension, Figma's,
| success: That flat design shifted the category of design
| software from professional creative software to something more
| akin to an office suite app (presentation software, like Google
| Slides, being the closest sibling). By the time work was
| starting on Figma in 2012, office suite software had already
| been long available and popular on the web, Google Docs was
| first released in 2006. This explains why no other application
| has been able to follow in Figma's footsteps by bringing
| creative software to the web: Figma didn't blaze a trail for
| other professional creative software to move to the web,
| instead Sketch blazed a trail for design software to become
| office suite software, a category that was already successful
| on the web.
|
| It's still difficult for me to wrap my head around that this
| has actually happened, because it's unheard of in other media
| editing industries for software to go backwards in
| capabilities. I always compare it to if movies suddenly stopped
| needing special effects, then of course the entire existing
| movie-making pipeline would be re-evaluated.
| Manik_agg wrote:
| Figma has come a long way, from a blocked Adobe acquisition to
| now filing for an IPO.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I see this play out a lot in my country's stock market. Where
| numbers are fine and all hunky dory. But in reality all increase
| in share prices -- those meteoric rises has already happened
| behind the curtain which separates it from the public (and for
| good). And then IPO comes and the public mostly oays for the
| final _exit_.
|
| Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term
| money of it's already at the top and this is the final stage of
| "finding someone to hold the bag" and in this case eventually --
| the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?
| habosa wrote:
| So much negativity in this thread. I thought we'd be able to
| celebrate this one. Figma provided an alternative to the evil
| Adobe empire that was actually better. It's powered by some
| amazing tech built originally by one of the founders. It's still
| got a generous free plan. I'm happy the employees will get to
| cash out.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I like Figma. My disappointment is that I know it's a transient
| tool. I grew up learning Photoshop, a tool which I now never
| use because it is expensive and neutered. And Sony Vegas, which
| is also expensive and pointless when free alternatives do the
| same thing. And now I can add Figma to the list of tools I
| learned but will likely never touch for even a free project.
| Which makes me sad! I like it.
|
| This business model isn't sustainable for individuals, so
| they're going to naturally be upset. If the B2B market is more
| lucrative for Figma then they have every right to optimize for
| it, but they're going to pay the cost in user goodwill. Many
| startups go through this process.
| lompad wrote:
| [flagged]
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I take uber every day and haven't found it to be
| "enshittified" (outside of some ads appearing in the app
| now).
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| It started off enshittified
| sahila wrote:
| It's not a big deal but the cars allowed on Uber has
| worsened. I remember trying to sign up as a driver a few
| years ago with a 2009 Corolla and being denied because the
| car was too old and now see cars from then allowed today.
| Maybe that's the cost of scaling but I find it worse. Also
| no more Uber pool.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| The enshittification is definitely happening on the driver-
| side with wordened working conditions and pay.
| arethuza wrote:
| I like Uber but I was surprised at how bad their mapping is
| - they get the route to get me home wrong and I've gone
| through the process of telling them about the mistake in
| their maps and they just seemed to ignore me.
| biwills wrote:
| I disagree, many companies are still great even after going
| public in the last decade:
|
| Shopify, Cloudflare, Zoom, Spotify, Roblox, and Coinbase are
| all notable examples.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Of those I only use Spotify and it pesters me at all hours
| of the day.
| Philpax wrote:
| "Great" for the majority of these is a stretch. There's no
| shortage of complaints about how Spotify treats both
| artists and customers, and Roblox enjoys yearly
| controversies from how it provides access to and exploits
| its customer base of children.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| I use Zoom and Spotify and both of those have gone downhill
| dramatically. Spotify to the extend that I really don't use
| it anymore.
| p_v_doom wrote:
| Bruh, Spotify has been absolutely shit, and their practices
| and push towards AI and completely unusuable suggestions
| algorithm are making it more and more shit.
| diggan wrote:
| > I thought we'd be able to celebrate this one.
|
| I mean yeah, it's cool and all that the employees and owners
| get a pay out, but IPOs are generally bad news for users, and
| I'm sure I'm not the only Figma user here, so makes sense that
| people are cautious about something that is usually bad news
| for them.
|
| > Figma provided an alternative to the evil Adobe empire that
| was actually better
|
| That's the crux, because generally IPOs mean that they'll now
| slowly turn into whatever it was they were supposed to fix.
| Maybe Figma will be the 1-in-a-billion products that won't
| suffer that fate, but it's understandable that people are now
| starting to casually look for alternatives, given most people's
| experience with IPOs.
| us0r wrote:
| > The table above does not reflect our renewed cloud hosting
| agreement with a third-party provider, entered into on May 31,
| 2025. Under the terms of the non-cancellable agreement, we
| committed to purchase a minimum of $545.0 million in cloud
| hosting services over the next five years. This renewed agreement
| replaces a previous agreement with the provider.
|
| $300k/DAY AWS bill. I wonder what the "non-cancellable" savings
| is.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Figma earns more profit for AWS than it could earn for itself
| firing everyone.
| taminka wrote:
| why is it so high? all of their high performance stuff is on
| device wasm, so all of that just to host their website and like
| collab features or some such?
| rudi-c wrote:
| There's plenty of server-side components to Figma that are
| substantially more complex and expensive than that of the
| typical website.
|
| Multiplayer means that every file that are user loads is
| loaded onto a compute server and retained in-memory on that
| server, processing every mutation to the document. Figma
| documents can get quite large -- they can contain the design
| system of an entire organization, dozens of variations of a
| product feature, etc. This means the server cost scales per
| active session at a given time, a higher "number" than active
| requests.
|
| In addition to multiplayer, Figma attempts to keep most other
| parts of the application real-time. If another user adds a
| file to a project, you will see it without refreshing the
| page. That's a simple example, but certain types of
| queries/mutation can get much more complex.
|
| Figma is an enterprise app, and the data models needed to
| support complex use cases (permissions, etc) means that DB
| load is a real challenge.
|
| While the DAU count of Figma might not be as high as other
| consumer apps, the amount of time those users spend in Figma
| is often substantially higher.
|
| Those are some of the things that contribute to a high bill.
| While Figma is most known for the frontend editor, the infra
| work is plenty interesting too.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Figma is an enterprise app, and the data models needed
| to support complex use cases (permissions, etc) means that
| DB load is a real challenge._
|
| This, "permissions, etc", isn't just an enterprise-scale
| problem, any multi-tenant system can and probably will hit
| it.
|
| Working out who can access what can sound simple enough,
| but it gets rather less pleasant when the rules can be set
| with more complex ACLs1 and because people can move around
| dynamically it is both potentially resource heavy to derive
| and difficult to cache2 both safely _and_ 3 efficiently. It
| is natural to think "well, we can simplify the permissions
| model", but you really can't when selling to different
| enterprises: many have their own idiosyncratic workflows,
| or local tweaks if using an "industry standard" workflow,
| and they will make a noise if your software to support them
| without extra tricks on their part.
|
| We are at a much smaller scale4, in another industry, but
| this is an issue we have to be very careful about.
|
| --------
|
| [1] Is this person in a given group? Does that give or
| remove permission? Can they just access, or edit, add, ...?
| also: different elements on the same screen could have very
| different ACLs to each other and at different times in a
| process
|
| [2] missing changes for a time could cause significant
| issues if users are working on something commercially
| important or otherwise sensitive
|
| [3] Safe is easy: don't cache at all. Efficient is easy:
| don't care about a bit of staleness and accept a bit of
| "eventual consistency"/"eventual correctness". Achieving
| both takes a pile of resource even with a great design.
|
| [4] We don't have to worry about consistently spreading
| data and processing over a set of DCs as our product has
| natural borders between tenants so splitting off into
| distinct DBs5 is an easy answer to some of the scale &
| efficiency issues.
|
| [5] rather than needing everything in on "public" system
| because anyone can potentially want to share access with
| _any_ other user.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Nvidia GPUs/Aws ai offerings?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted for asking a question.
| One POV is that Figma's technology can afford to be run
| expensively. Their on device ie in browser stuff is running
| on very expensive computers too. It isn't necessarily
| optimal. We don't know.
| StratusBen wrote:
| And yet they still have a ~90% gross margin -- honestly not too
| shabby!
| nout wrote:
| More and more companies are now holding bitcoin in their
| treasuries (including Figma according to the filling). It's
| interesting, but it makes a lot of sense.
| __loam wrote:
| It's pretty weird that a lot of the business leadership in tech
| is earnestly invested in a recreation of the free banking era
| actually.
| v5v3 wrote:
| Why does it make sense? When the price is so volatile.
|
| If the companies are so confident of their trading ability then
| they should stop their existing business and become trading
| companies.
| Alex_L_Wood wrote:
| Maybe this will finally cause designers to ditch Figma. It's a
| fantastic tool for designers, but it's complete shit for
| developers.
| h1fra wrote:
| Congrats Figma! It annoys me every time I open their UI, billions
| of dollars in revenue for a web design tool, yet still no way to
| export tokens natively as CSS.
| hyperbolablabla wrote:
| It's funny its performance is touted as its biggest selling
| point, I find it to be painfully slow
| dgb23 wrote:
| Compared to what?
| rglullis wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but I really wish we had a system where we could
| make bets to pit public companies that develop closed source
| software against its FOSS alternatives.
|
| In the example here: people would bet by either buying $100 worth
| of Figma shares, or they could buy $50 worth of put options and
| _give_ $50 to the developers of Penpot.
|
| Would something like that be legal or does it violate any type of
| trading regulations?
| dkdcio wrote:
| it's only illegal if you start beating the rich
|
| I would love to be a reverse--VC
| rglullis wrote:
| This is one of the many things where I have a good chunk of
| the backend code already written but couldn't find the time
| or urgency to work on an MVP.
|
| Should I make a mock system, see how many people would be
| willing to sign up and make a pledge to their favorite
| projects?
| raincole wrote:
| But people can already buy $100 of Figma shares (upon its IPO).
| Why would people who want to buy Figma share use your
| hypothetical platform?
| rglullis wrote:
| My idea is more about a system that can track and mediate
| support for the pro-FOSS than anything. For the pro-
| commercial side of the bet, showing ownership of the shares
| would be enough I guess.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Don't we have that system? Post IPO you can absolutely buy puts
| on FIG while donating to Penpot.
|
| (I do not recommend this)
| rglullis wrote:
| Doing that as separate actions are of course possible. My
| idea is to have a _system_ to let people do this and track
| the results in a single place.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I read that as though new companies filing IPO should use files
| created with Figma.
| dcchuck wrote:
| Congratulations to the Figma team! Well earned. It was such an
| exciting product when it hit the scene. It became the standard so
| fast, and it was easy to see why. When there were talks of them
| being bought for $20 billion I thought it was a great deal for
| Adobe - and that was before seeing these impressive financials.
|
| I will admit I have waned enthusiasm a on Figma over the past
| couple of years. I find the UI churn confusing. The new features,
| i.e. dev mode and variables, feel out of place. I find the plugin
| ecosystem cumbersome. Doing simple things has become complex. I'm
| putting out real "who moved my cheese?" energy here I know. I
| suppose I'm wondering if others feel the same.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Others do, and an IPO and the resultant financial pressure
| means we'll be looking for a different platform to migrate to.
| Products simply never get better at this point from a
| customer's perspective.
| jacob_rezi wrote:
| It seems so risk adverse right? I couldnt imagine telling my
| team to explore a new way to design as a result of the coming
| IPO
| avgDev wrote:
| This is tale as old as time honestly.
|
| Create a product sell or IPO. Revenue pressure increases.
| Product cost is increased or staff is cut. New software takes
| crown. Rinse and repeat.
| whymsicalburito wrote:
| I'm a little surprised by this comment because both dev mode
| and variables are the main ways I use Figma. Our design team
| creates the design and then the Devs use dev mode to implement
| what they designed. Dev mode has been great for our team!
|
| Is this an uncommon use case?
| soseng wrote:
| As a dev who only really uses the read-only version of Figma
| for the most part, I really like what they do. I can't speak
| for designers but having the Figma diagrams match the libraries
| and the design system we use is very very nice. no guessing
| about colors, typography, spacing. I can just copy and paste
| into my CSS for front end work. The interface is smooth and
| fast for us non-design focused devs
| swyx wrote:
| as someone whos worked in a bad figma before, dont forget to
| give credit to your designers for setting up the design
| system that well that you can copy and paste like that. there
| are many designers who do not give two shits about how it
| looks in the dev handoff - figma tries but often fails to put
| them on guardrails to keep consistency to THEIR OWN designs
| lol
| The5thElephant wrote:
| What about variables that don't use pixel units? Often values
| appear as hardcoded in dev-mode when they are actually meant
| to be a % unit or something else Figma doesn't support
| because Figma doesn't actually use CSS for rendering.
|
| When my devs just copy whats in Figma dev-mode they get so
| much stuff wrong.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| I actually have the opposite problem with Figma. It is way too
| basic and simple, targeting every kind of design and the
| average designer skill level.
|
| I work in complex SAAS product design. Basic things I can do in
| CSS I can't do in Figma. Things like a table? Yeah it is
| entirely faked and awful in Figma. Don't even get me started on
| anything more complicated than flex rows and columns.
|
| Half the debate over designer/dev handoff in the industry right
| now is simply because of Figma's limitations and the refusal of
| designers and front-end devs alike to learn HTML and CSS.
|
| We need a Blender-like tool for web and app product design.
| Highly capable and advanced, you aren't expected to know all of
| it, and it can do anything you want it to.
|
| I need a tool that is more than just a fancy rectangle drawer.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| That sounds awful and after your comment, I'm glad I've stuck
| with Sketch.
| asoneth wrote:
| I agree with many of your statements but draw the opposite
| conclusion.
|
| HTML and CSS are expressive, have a vast selection of
| libraries and tools, and can actually result in shippable
| code. Designers and front-end devs should learn and use it.
|
| But I don't see the point in creating a design tool unless
| it's meaningfully simpler than HTML/CSS. I reach for Figma
| when I need to quickly mock up a dozen iterations using our
| design system and fancy rectangles. It's fast enough that I
| can make mockups in realtime during discussions with
| developers and subject matter experts. But if I'm actually
| going to take the time to set constraints to make things flex
| properly or make a real table then why not use HTML and CSS
| directly?
| trinix912 wrote:
| There are also Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, both of which
| were used for UI design until Sketch/Figma appeared. Both
| harder to learn and more expensive.
|
| The problem then was that the designs could be too cumbersome
| to implement (and also that you couldn't share files with
| developers as easily, but Sketch has the same problem). You
| can really do just about anything in PS/AI, whereas with
| Figma and Sketch it's almost like they limit you to what an
| average developer can implement with CSS.
|
| That being said, we're in the age where you can do pretty
| much anything with CSS, and I totally agree with you that
| Figma's controls are very basic (especially for typography,
| there's just not enough options).
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