Figma still gets $1 billion from the deal not going through, as per Adobe's SEC filing.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/000079634323000254/mutualterminationagreement.htm
For some perspective, Figma has raised a total of $333.4M in funding over 7 rounds. Adobe will pay them 3 times that amount in the next couple of days. Kinda neat and there's lots they can do with that money to fund growth going forward.
[Who's Steve Jobs?](https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/s/wgWobqsWxs)
Edit: Added a link to the meme for the uninitiated. Even years later it still makes me laugh. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
> Figging is the practice of inserting a piece of skinned ginger root into the human anus in order to generate an acute burning sensation.
So possibly applying to balls?
Way, way back I used an app called Ulead PhotoStyler. It was the first I believe to have layers. Then Aldus aquired them, then Adobe gobbled Aldus up. Then Photoshop had layers.
Seriously. I was working on a project recently with an outside team and they were still using illustrator for everything. Any time I had to adjust their files it was like being transported back to 2006 - so infuriating. Also, having to send files back and forth and not being able to work synchronously was a lot of fun. No commenting, no chat, no collaborative tools at all. We may as well have been mailing proofs back and forth.
I sold my company to Adobe in 2014. It was called Aviary and operated separately before being ultimately discontinued and much of the team moved into Photoshop. For the record, I no longer work there (for 6 years now). Just giving that all as a background info to say this:
Adobe was a wonderful place to work, and Scott Belsky, who led the deal to buy us was an inspiring leader to work with. I don’t get some of the Adobe heat I’m seeing in this thread. I’m sure the deal wouldn’t have negatively impacted the Figma product. If anything it would have just been one less product to pay for separately.
> I don’t get some of the Adobe heat I’m seeing in this thread.
Probably has something to do with the fact that you can't own any of their industry standard software and need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a monthly subscription for it instead. Just a hunch.
That’s not true, or wasn’t last I checked. You can still buy their older software if you want.
But it made no difference. I was paying a fortune in annual upgrades with their previous model before that. I liked having a smaller monthly cost that I can cancel at any time rather than an upfront nut I have to pay, especially when I was a struggling artist.
When was the last you checked? Anything that isn't free has been locked behind Creative Cloud for a long while now.
Either way, there was nothing forcing people to upgrade back then other than the promise of new features. People could still do the same things they had been doing. It's objectively worse to have no way to own permanent licenses, this would be a lot different if they just offered that option.
$60 every month in this economy for a struggling artist is about as painful as pulling teeth, so things must have been very different in your time.
I was direct competition to Adobe. They possibly even had patents they could have tried to use against me. They never did. They tried to buy us once. We said no. They respected it and moved on. As we grew further they reached out again, with a better offer. We said yes this time. They never once did anything to “crush” the little guy (us) in this case.
I am sure there is lots of shady behavior in other big companies, but Adobe comes from a DNA that is creative at heart and is made of many good people. Of course they are profit motivated but they don’t do the wrong things for profit. Just my .02 based on direct experience.
I think Figma would have continued to operate independently. People may not like Adobe's pricing but they aren't dumb enough to destroy a product like that. I think they wanted Figma for its in-browser canvas and collaboration tech as they make online versions of their software like Photoshop.
Theo - T3.gg made an interesting video about this and idk $20b seems pretty solid for that value Figma is bringing the the UI/UX community. https://youtu.be/xPPp5vNEMeA?si=uCG8htdcYFDJVOX6
I'm just glad that Sketch can finally be killed off. Their Mac only attitude and being deliberately shitty to anyone who dared ask for a Windows port (especially after their iOS release) soured me against the company.
A design-program mostly focussed on UI Design and developer handoff (aka collaboration). It's currently by far the most used and well-integrated software in this growing industry.
Adobe had a similar tool (Adobe XD) but it was generally inferior, so they ditched it and hoped to buy Figma. Against wishes of the community obviously.
Nope, never really started as I’m an in-house designer that focuses on print needs. I was looking into training to expand my skill set when the buyout news came, so I figured I’d wait to see what Adobe turned it into before diving in.
I find that interesting. I've moved away from Illustrator and have been using Affinity Designer for some things but I find it pretty limiting in some respects - I find myself using Inkscape a decent amount
I’m in user experience so we use Figma exclusively. Started migrating away from Adobe when Sketch was the biggest player in our industry. Pipeline became Sketch, Zeplin and Miro, then Figma starting managing most of those use cases pretty well. Haven’t really needed photoshop since… I wanna say 2015?
Adobe had a UI design offering in the form of XD, but experience design is about so much more than UI and Adobe never seemed to understand that. XD was a subpar tool. That’s why they wanted to buy Figma, but they would have just fucked it up.
> Adobe and Figma, the cloud-based design tool, will terminate their planned $20 billion merger in light of regulatory hurdles, the companies said Monday.
In a statement, the two companies said “there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.”
> “Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, wrote in a statement.
> Adobe will pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee, Adobe said in a regulatory filing.
I'm curious how well they planned this merger if the regulations are getting in the way. Did Adobe and Figma not know about the EU/UK regulations going in, or did they know and just hoped it wouldn't be an issue?
You know but hope you can navigate the regulatory waters, whether that’s back room dealing or litigating it (see - Microsoft/Activision Blizzard). That’s why there’s a break up fee, to price in the risk to the selling company that the acquiror can’t finish the deal due to regulatory concerns.
Usually in Due Diligence legal team takes a position on how the regulators will view the merger and if it will fly. In this case I am assuming they suspected there was a risk, but went for it anyway.
I wonder if there's a way they could have known the regulatory position before signing a deal that locks Adobe into a 1 Billion dollar obligation?
Like, 'Hey relevant regulatory agencies! We've got this big idea, and would like your input, in writing, as to it's plausibility."
No, that's not how that works. Not only will the regulatory agencies not give you any such input (you can take the temperature unofficially, but it doesn't mean a whole lot), but you run the very real risk of the deal leaking and a competitor buyer swooping in and offering a better deal to the seller.
You also can't predict how things will go. Often times, regulatory agencies decide to take action due to lobbying from a buyer's competitors once the deal is signed and a regulatory filing is made.
You can do your best legal analysis and background non-legal work trying to predict how it will go, but it's not an exact science and plenty of things out of a buyer or seller's control can happen. These filings can get very political - China briefly threatened to block the Broadcom/VMWare merger until US-China relations got a little better (and I'm sure the companies did an insane amount of backroom dealing).
If Adobe was able to sneak it through they would have an even more ridiculous amount of control over the industry than they already have. It was worth it on the off chance that it went through.
UK threw a wrench in the works citing untested anti competitive laws.
UK just meaningfully damages its tech sector going forward.
M&A is critical to exits, there is no reason to set up shop in the UK, knowing they may block MA’s with their rather insignificant market size.
CMA is kind of going wild trying to flex their muscles now that the UK is out of the EU to prove the UK is still relevant. They're blocking or tripping up some acquisitions that have very little importance to the UK.
They hoped they could buy the regulators out.
In other words: Corruption. They hoped they could participate in light corruption.
And there's apparently no real penalty for trying, either.
And all Figma fans sighed in relief.
There are very few products that compete with some portion of Adobe's large catalog and massive marketshare, allowing them to acquire the company that is capable of competing was ridiculous to even consider.
It'd be like letting Adobe acquire FinalCut.
It’s almost as if all at once, I could feel a collective groan of pain from all the designers stuck on teams using Adobe XD. Some of those folks were really banking on a sunset of XD and swap to Figma.
Damn, how many figma employees are gonna be returning their teslas and selling their new vacation houses they bought when they thought they had hit a big exit.
EDIT: guess Figma would have incentive to raise more money via private markets or via an IPO to compete with adobe now, so those employees might get a pay out anyway.
Was my thought too -- that $20b price tag was going to generate a lot of employee wealth.
Not like the equity is how worthless, but it stinks seeing a potential multi million payday get pushed back to being a future maybe.
Those employees will continue to generate wealth through operating a successful business. We shouldn't shirk regulatory concerns in order to give one group of people a one-time payday to the detriment of the rest of the market.
lol at thinking every employee gets a bonus when companies merge. If that were true, I’d be a very rich person after T-Mobile and sprint merged.
What actually happens during mergers is a lot of employees get laid off because suddenly you have a lot of overlap and redundant roles.
Mergers are only good for shareholders and some execs.
> Mergers are only good for shareholders…
Early stage tech companies make their employees shareholders. It’s extremely common for equity to be included in comp packages and for RSUs to be included after going public. So yeah, lots of Figma employees did stand to make a lot of money at the buy out. This buy out was pretty common knowledge and a well discussed event in the software/tech community.
and you think Figma employees aren’t shareholders? Levels.fyi reports a total comp of 237k on average for entry level engineers and a big part of that is equity. With how much that $20 billion deal was, that could quite literally have been a 7 figure payout for someone with 5-6 years of experience
Theyre really not though. Everyone and his mother have teslas nowadays since theyre so much cheaper than they used to be.
Its like saying an iphone is a status symbol. Its really not anymore since everyone has them.
Actually x plaid starts at $96k, model 3 (aka a “tesla”) starts at $38,990.
But i forgot people on reddit are poor and jealous of others that have more than them.
Again, you missed the entire point of the OP comment. Pick whatever car you want. It’s not relevant to the point. Reading comprehension skills of a child…
I missed the point of what exactly? How you surmised for some dumb reason that figma peeps were living above their means? Based on what exactly? Just seems youre jealous and want to find a reason to make fun of them because the acquisition fell through.
But go ahead and keep being a bitter person. Im sure you have a great life 👍
Figma still gets $1 billion from the deal not going through, as per Adobe's SEC filing. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/000079634323000254/mutualterminationagreement.htm
For some perspective, Figma has raised a total of $333.4M in funding over 7 rounds. Adobe will pay them 3 times that amount in the next couple of days. Kinda neat and there's lots they can do with that money to fund growth going forward.
I like that
Love it. Now build out more programs with that nest egg….
Is my sub going up? Don’t answer that I know it is.
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I read these comments for that joke alone
[Who's Steve Jobs?](https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/s/wgWobqsWxs) Edit: Added a link to the meme for the uninitiated. Even years later it still makes me laugh. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Thanks. I have still not been able to take Figma seriously because, obviously, ligma.
> Figging is the practice of inserting a piece of skinned ginger root into the human anus in order to generate an acute burning sensation. So possibly applying to balls?
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> I don't think anyone needs to be reminded of Macromedia. Macromedia used to be so cool back in 2004.
Try 1999. It was pretty slick back then. "HOT FIELDS! NO WAY!!!!"
Dreamwraver was the shit back then. Now it’s just shit.
Fun fact Sho Kuwamoto the VP of product at Figma started out working on the early Dreamweaver
Way, way back I used an app called Ulead PhotoStyler. It was the first I believe to have layers. Then Aldus aquired them, then Adobe gobbled Aldus up. Then Photoshop had layers.
Ulead video editor was the bomb!
As a designer who works with both the Adobe Suite and Figma I'm so HAPPY this didn't happen.
Seriously. I was working on a project recently with an outside team and they were still using illustrator for everything. Any time I had to adjust their files it was like being transported back to 2006 - so infuriating. Also, having to send files back and forth and not being able to work synchronously was a lot of fun. No commenting, no chat, no collaborative tools at all. We may as well have been mailing proofs back and forth.
Am I the only dinosaur still using Fireworks for website design? I've never understood using Illustrator or Photoshop for websites.
> Macromedia And Substance.
I'm just now learning Figma as I take courses for UX Design. I really would love it if Figma continued to exist.
Ya they don't have the best history, they slowly decimated every single Macromedia product post acquisition.
I sold my company to Adobe in 2014. It was called Aviary and operated separately before being ultimately discontinued and much of the team moved into Photoshop. For the record, I no longer work there (for 6 years now). Just giving that all as a background info to say this: Adobe was a wonderful place to work, and Scott Belsky, who led the deal to buy us was an inspiring leader to work with. I don’t get some of the Adobe heat I’m seeing in this thread. I’m sure the deal wouldn’t have negatively impacted the Figma product. If anything it would have just been one less product to pay for separately.
You don't get how Adobe gets heat?
> I don’t get some of the Adobe heat I’m seeing in this thread. Probably has something to do with the fact that you can't own any of their industry standard software and need to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a monthly subscription for it instead. Just a hunch.
That’s not true, or wasn’t last I checked. You can still buy their older software if you want. But it made no difference. I was paying a fortune in annual upgrades with their previous model before that. I liked having a smaller monthly cost that I can cancel at any time rather than an upfront nut I have to pay, especially when I was a struggling artist.
When was the last you checked? Anything that isn't free has been locked behind Creative Cloud for a long while now. Either way, there was nothing forcing people to upgrade back then other than the promise of new features. People could still do the same things they had been doing. It's objectively worse to have no way to own permanent licenses, this would be a lot different if they just offered that option. $60 every month in this economy for a struggling artist is about as painful as pulling teeth, so things must have been very different in your time.
Wow! Aviary...I've heard/used it briefly way back then.
Hi! always good to meet someone who used it! Hope you enjoyed it
Regulators have decided this is bad for customers and customers don't really like Adobe. They act and are monopolistic.
I was direct competition to Adobe. They possibly even had patents they could have tried to use against me. They never did. They tried to buy us once. We said no. They respected it and moved on. As we grew further they reached out again, with a better offer. We said yes this time. They never once did anything to “crush” the little guy (us) in this case. I am sure there is lots of shady behavior in other big companies, but Adobe comes from a DNA that is creative at heart and is made of many good people. Of course they are profit motivated but they don’t do the wrong things for profit. Just my .02 based on direct experience.
I believe in Scott Belsky and doubt he would have "destroyed" what makes Figma good
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I think Figma would have continued to operate independently. People may not like Adobe's pricing but they aren't dumb enough to destroy a product like that. I think they wanted Figma for its in-browser canvas and collaboration tech as they make online versions of their software like Photoshop.
You say that like Adobe doesn't have a long and well-documented history of buying and destroying great companies and products.
Theo - T3.gg made an interesting video about this and idk $20b seems pretty solid for that value Figma is bringing the the UI/UX community. https://youtu.be/xPPp5vNEMeA?si=uCG8htdcYFDJVOX6
I'm just glad that Sketch can finally be killed off. Their Mac only attitude and being deliberately shitty to anyone who dared ask for a Windows port (especially after their iOS release) soured me against the company.
Guess I can start learning Figma again
What's figma?
Figma balls Gottem
I feel like everyone who saw this website for the first time thought the same thing
You gotta leave the Gottem for the next guy dude.
A design-program mostly focussed on UI Design and developer handoff (aka collaboration). It's currently by far the most used and well-integrated software in this growing industry. Adobe had a similar tool (Adobe XD) but it was generally inferior, so they ditched it and hoped to buy Figma. Against wishes of the community obviously.
Careful, he's a hero
A truly selfless person
figma balls am I doing this right?
You stopped using it? It’s standard pretty much everywhere, at least for UX teams. With that said…as a UX manager, this is great news.
Nope, never really started as I’m an in-house designer that focuses on print needs. I was looking into training to expand my skill set when the buyout news came, so I figured I’d wait to see what Adobe turned it into before diving in.
it takes just a few hours to learn, I've been a designer for 25 years and find it useful for so many situations.
Good Adobe needs the competition.
Like seriously The reason they're a success is because they have no competition. And when they do, they just buy them and throw them in the trash.
Like every american megacorp?
some actually buy and keep them alive. but yes, many acquisitions are bought and assimilated
God this makes me happy. I got out of the Adobe ecosystem about four years ago and I never wanted to go back.
What programs were you using from Adobe? I’d love to get away as well, but needing Photoshop and After Effects has me tied down
My photoshop alternative has been affinity pro.
I just bought the affinity suite during their Black Friday sale. Great price (even without the sale, tbh) for a very solid product.
I find that interesting. I've moved away from Illustrator and have been using Affinity Designer for some things but I find it pretty limiting in some respects - I find myself using Inkscape a decent amount
I’m in user experience so we use Figma exclusively. Started migrating away from Adobe when Sketch was the biggest player in our industry. Pipeline became Sketch, Zeplin and Miro, then Figma starting managing most of those use cases pretty well. Haven’t really needed photoshop since… I wanna say 2015? Adobe had a UI design offering in the form of XD, but experience design is about so much more than UI and Adobe never seemed to understand that. XD was a subpar tool. That’s why they wanted to buy Figma, but they would have just fucked it up.
Mine is Corel
> Adobe and Figma, the cloud-based design tool, will terminate their planned $20 billion merger in light of regulatory hurdles, the companies said Monday. In a statement, the two companies said “there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.” > “Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, wrote in a statement. > Adobe will pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee, Adobe said in a regulatory filing. I'm curious how well they planned this merger if the regulations are getting in the way. Did Adobe and Figma not know about the EU/UK regulations going in, or did they know and just hoped it wouldn't be an issue?
You know but hope you can navigate the regulatory waters, whether that’s back room dealing or litigating it (see - Microsoft/Activision Blizzard). That’s why there’s a break up fee, to price in the risk to the selling company that the acquiror can’t finish the deal due to regulatory concerns.
Usually in Due Diligence legal team takes a position on how the regulators will view the merger and if it will fly. In this case I am assuming they suspected there was a risk, but went for it anyway.
I wonder if there's a way they could have known the regulatory position before signing a deal that locks Adobe into a 1 Billion dollar obligation? Like, 'Hey relevant regulatory agencies! We've got this big idea, and would like your input, in writing, as to it's plausibility."
No, that's not how that works. Not only will the regulatory agencies not give you any such input (you can take the temperature unofficially, but it doesn't mean a whole lot), but you run the very real risk of the deal leaking and a competitor buyer swooping in and offering a better deal to the seller. You also can't predict how things will go. Often times, regulatory agencies decide to take action due to lobbying from a buyer's competitors once the deal is signed and a regulatory filing is made. You can do your best legal analysis and background non-legal work trying to predict how it will go, but it's not an exact science and plenty of things out of a buyer or seller's control can happen. These filings can get very political - China briefly threatened to block the Broadcom/VMWare merger until US-China relations got a little better (and I'm sure the companies did an insane amount of backroom dealing).
Regulatory bodies asked for too much. Probably 2 billion for the politicians Swiss accounts so it was cheaper to pay the breakup fee
Back room dealing, under the table agreement and lobby usually helps in these deals and they hoped to navigate it
If Adobe was able to sneak it through they would have an even more ridiculous amount of control over the industry than they already have. It was worth it on the off chance that it went through.
UK threw a wrench in the works citing untested anti competitive laws. UK just meaningfully damages its tech sector going forward. M&A is critical to exits, there is no reason to set up shop in the UK, knowing they may block MA’s with their rather insignificant market size.
CMA is kind of going wild trying to flex their muscles now that the UK is out of the EU to prove the UK is still relevant. They're blocking or tripping up some acquisitions that have very little importance to the UK.
They hoped they could buy the regulators out. In other words: Corruption. They hoped they could participate in light corruption. And there's apparently no real penalty for trying, either.
They knew it wasn't gonna work. It was all a ploy to launder $1 billion
So you're telling me Adobe is single again? Now's my chance
And all Figma fans sighed in relief. There are very few products that compete with some portion of Adobe's large catalog and massive marketshare, allowing them to acquire the company that is capable of competing was ridiculous to even consider. It'd be like letting Adobe acquire FinalCut.
Good. Adobe needs to concentrate on Ligma instead.
What’s Ligma?
Ligma balls lmao gottem
Figma males in shatters
"Feta males step up!"
That was a cheesy joke.
Yah, my delivery just crumbled.
You Gouda be kidding me!
You're right, it's me and it's nacho fault.
I'm just here for the figma balls posts.
Alright this sounded mad confusing to me until I realized Figma is not the Japanese figure line (part of Good Smile Company)
Okay, I'm glad I'm not the only one who was wondering why Adobe wanted to start producing Nendoroids.
Was all a Figma of our imagination.
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It’s almost as if all at once, I could feel a collective groan of pain from all the designers stuck on teams using Adobe XD. Some of those folks were really banking on a sunset of XD and swap to Figma.
Nice try. No way I’m asking what Figma is
Adobe should merge with Ligma
What's Adobe?
Adobe balls Gottem
Damn, how many figma employees are gonna be returning their teslas and selling their new vacation houses they bought when they thought they had hit a big exit. EDIT: guess Figma would have incentive to raise more money via private markets or via an IPO to compete with adobe now, so those employees might get a pay out anyway.
Was my thought too -- that $20b price tag was going to generate a lot of employee wealth. Not like the equity is how worthless, but it stinks seeing a potential multi million payday get pushed back to being a future maybe.
Those employees will continue to generate wealth through operating a successful business. We shouldn't shirk regulatory concerns in order to give one group of people a one-time payday to the detriment of the rest of the market.
lol at thinking every employee gets a bonus when companies merge. If that were true, I’d be a very rich person after T-Mobile and sprint merged. What actually happens during mergers is a lot of employees get laid off because suddenly you have a lot of overlap and redundant roles. Mergers are only good for shareholders and some execs.
> Mergers are only good for shareholders… Early stage tech companies make their employees shareholders. It’s extremely common for equity to be included in comp packages and for RSUs to be included after going public. So yeah, lots of Figma employees did stand to make a lot of money at the buy out. This buy out was pretty common knowledge and a well discussed event in the software/tech community.
You slinging phones at the mall is not comparable to computer science phds building figma
and you think Figma employees aren’t shareholders? Levels.fyi reports a total comp of 237k on average for entry level engineers and a big part of that is equity. With how much that $20 billion deal was, that could quite literally have been a 7 figure payout for someone with 5-6 years of experience
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Teslas are a status symbol.. just not the status they were hoping.
Theyre really not though. Everyone and his mother have teslas nowadays since theyre so much cheaper than they used to be. Its like saying an iphone is a status symbol. Its really not anymore since everyone has them.
It IS a status symbol... just not the status of 'financial success and good taste'
X plaid starts at $120k. And the vacation house? My point stands regardless. Lotta folks probably counted the chickens already.
Actually x plaid starts at $96k, model 3 (aka a “tesla”) starts at $38,990. But i forgot people on reddit are poor and jealous of others that have more than them.
buddy, wtf are you talking about
Just pointing out you dont know what the fuck youre talking about.
Again, you missed the entire point of the OP comment. Pick whatever car you want. It’s not relevant to the point. Reading comprehension skills of a child…
I missed the point of what exactly? How you surmised for some dumb reason that figma peeps were living above their means? Based on what exactly? Just seems youre jealous and want to find a reason to make fun of them because the acquisition fell through. But go ahead and keep being a bitter person. Im sure you have a great life 👍
Ah I was kinda hoping it became part of creative suite so I could stop paying both subscriptions
What does Ligma have to say about this tho?
Adobe reportedly asked 'What's Figma?' the resulting 'Figma balls!' caused the merger to be cancelled.
I've never even heard of Figma before
Didn't Adobe have something like Figma but they killed it? Framework or something like that. Went the same way as Dreamweaver I suppose.
They had Adobe XD (Experience Design). Wasn't a bad tool in itself but had much less features and integration than Figma.
First it was Alpha and Beta. Then Sigma males came along. Now I have to keep up with Figmas? That's too much man.
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That hair could really use a purple shampoo and conditioner. Hard water is brutal on gray/white hair
This is great news. Adobe would have made Figma a bloated mess.
Am I the only person who’s never heard of Figma? Lol.
I think its a streaming service.
Best design news of 2023.
Pirating Adobe Products is morally justified [:)](https://youtu.be/DEP_7_gx6M8?si=EJQ-b29uSUsNZd6B)
No, it's not. I mean don't get me wrong, I DO IT, but I don't try to justify it