Figma files for proposed IPO (opens in new tab)

> 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.

> 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.

  > 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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

Wait, so no one asked Evan to explain the code? Something smells fishy.

Do you think AI could take a crack at understanding it for you?

That's... not a screaming testimony, dude.

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".

It's incredibly snappy. It works fine on subpar hardware like a late 2013 11" MacBook Air. Truly amazing.

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...

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.

Designers complaining that their pixel perfect mockup in any software not aligning with layout in actual browsers is a literal decades old complaint.

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.

True... this was a conscious trade-off at Figma since it needs to support designs for web, iOS, Android, etc. That unfortunately means it doesn't map 1:1 to any of them.

So? Before Sketch/Figma got popular, designers had been literally passing .psd files as design specs around for a decade.

I think you're confusing esbuild with ESLint. ESLint was created by Nicholas C Zakas.

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.

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.

> 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?

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)

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.

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.

Nvidia GPUs/Aws ai offerings?

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.

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.

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

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?

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).

That sounds awful and after your comment, I'm glad I've stuck with Sketch.

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.

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

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%

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.

They received a $1B termination fee in 2023 when their acquisition by Adobe collapsed. They would be losing money in 2023 otherwise

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I'm pretty sure almost nothing involved in building a multi billion dollar business is generalizable to even .01% of other things

That’s one way to frame it, but it’s missing the power imbalance. Loveable was the smaller party here, Figma suddenly turned hostile when their success overlapped with a feature Figma hadn’t monetized yet.

“Used the moment” sounds a lot like surviving a punch and then asking for help. If you think that’s scheming, maybe revisit who threw the first punch.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I see it as more of a hedge. Put 1% into the counterpoint to the rest of your portfolio. I'm personally heavily invested in crypto so I make sure to hold traditional stonks as kind of a hedge against all this space cash crashing to ground. At this point though, crypto are basically ETFs so it's all one big pie now.

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.

to be a lot more profitable

Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS.

But Figma itself is excellent at what it does.

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...

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 :)

And can be self hosted which is a massive plus!

It’s the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because they are going public for the meme stock value.

> 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.

It says more about Bitcoin than it does Figma.

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.

I take uber every day and haven't found it to be "enshittified" (outside of some ads appearing in the app now).

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.

Still the default for most teams at Apple AFAIK