(Archived link without a paywall.) The Verge sat down with Dylan Field for his first extended interview since the acquisition fell through. First, they discussed the impact on the team — Figma cut internal valuation in half to $10 billion and updated everyone’s comp packages to account for the lost value from the deal not happening. Also, they announced the severance program called Detach (get it?!) for anyone who wanted to leave — around 52 people or 4% of the employees took it.

The company is doing well: ​“The business has been cash-flow positive for a while, I’m told, and it finished 2023 with about $600 million in annual recurring revenue — a roughly 40 percent increase from the year before. […] And Figma is now flush with even more cash, thanks to Adobe having to pay it a hefty $1 billion breakup fee.” Dylan considers using this fee to do more strategic mergers and acquisitions in the future, and has an insightful way of thinking about what kind of products that could be: ​“Let’s figure out the value chain of what it takes to think about, get buy-in for, design, code, ship, and measure software. How do we complete that value chain?”

Love this take on the AI: ​“If you think about what it takes to create great design, there’s so much in that context window that’s emotional or thinking temporally about a brand experience or a user flow. I just don’t see how, in the near term, AI is able to have that as part of its context, which means that humans are providing that.”

Stumbled upon this old blog post from 2019 by Alex Harri, one of the engineers behind Figma’s Vector Networks. Fascinatingly deep dive! ​“This post can be thought of as an introduction to a really interesting problem space, and as a resource for people interested in making use of some aspects of Vector Networks for future applications. I hope it succeeds in providing value to both developers being introduced to new concepts and ideas, and to designers interested in learning more about the tool they know and love.”

An inspiring story from Corey Lee on becoming a Figma Designer Advocate in Japan through community work and advocacy. ​“I’d never heard of a Designer Advocate but after reading the role description I realized all the things I had been doing up until that point all related to the role: advocating for design, enabling designers, creating content, and building community. I already was a designer advocate.”

In this episode of the ​“Tech Chat” podcast, Luis shares his journey, shedding light on how he found his path to Figma and what it’s like to serve as a design advocate.

An episode of the In Depth podcast with Kyle Parrish, Figma’s first sales hire, who built the company’s zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. ​“When he joined Figma as its very 1st sales hire, Kyle was eager to hit the ground running and close deals. So he was caught off guard when CEO Dylan Field assigned him to work customer support for the first 4 weeks. But looking back, it’s a tactic that paid dividends.”

What a fun Figma launch video from 2016! That was way before I considered a switch from Sketch or even heard of Figma. (If you’re not familiar with Sandwich and Adam Lisagor’s work, check out their other commercials.)

Soleio, an early designer at Facebook, is now one of the best-known designers turned investors. He shared a story on the Design MBA podcast about investing in Figma’s seed round in 2012, which became his highest-performing investment.

Figma presents a 2023 Handoff, ​“a year-end celebration of the big plays and deep learnings we plan to carry into next season.” A beautiful collection of articles on diverse topics summing up this year — top 10 things the team shipped this year, what it takes to bring AI features to market, 36 questions to fall (back) in love with tech, a multiplayer guide to great meetings, a definition of what work looks and feels like right now, professional pivots, and the joy of mechanical keyboards.

This week, Figma dropped a few hints on the upcoming physical product they’re introducing in collaboration with Work Louder on December 12th. Took me a moment to connect the dots, but Work Louder actually shared a sneak peek of this collab over a year ago (!). The product seems to be a Figma-branded version of their Creator Micro mini-keyboard, and I even shared how it can be used with FigJam back in issue #110. If you’re curious why they’re building this, see a new article Tap into joy with mechanical keyboards.

Speaking of Diagram, Ridd interviewed Marco Cornacchia — the founding designer at Diagram, and now a product designer at Figma. ​“In this episode, Marco shares how he (accidentally) created a new trend of animated bento grids. And we also get a behind the scenes of what it was like being the founding designer of Diagram and ultimately getting acquired by Figma.”

Congrats to Jordan Singer on making it to the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list: ​“Product designer-turned-entrepreneur Jorgan Singer founded Diagram, a startup that created web-based design tools dubbed ​“Magician” and ​“Genius” that used AI and text-based prompts to generate design ideas and suggest design recommendations. Diagram quickly gained steam among its 100,000 users before being acquired by $20 billion design company Figma in 2023.” For more of his story, listen to the ​“Building Design Tools” episode of the Design is for Everyone Podcast and a long list of ideas that he has built since 2015.

UK is following in EU’s footsteps: ​“CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) provisionally finds Adobe’s deal to buy Figma would likely harm innovation for software used by the vast majority of UK digital designers.”

Not sure if the CMA truly understands what each of the apps is for: ​“The inquiry group has also provisionally found that Figma is a credible future competitor to Adobe in image editing and illustration software – and that the threat posed by Figma has driven product development in Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator applications, including new web versions. The inquiry group considers that if the deal went ahead, it would eliminate Figma as a competitor which would otherwise have continued to seek to develop its capabilities in image editing and illustration, thereby fuelling innovation and product development by Adobe.”

November 17th, 2023: ​“The European Commission has informed Adobe of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of Figma may reduce competition in the global markets for the supply of interactive product design software and of other creative design software.”

Pretty incredible in this economy: ​“Design startup Figma Inc.’s headcount has grown roughly 60% since it announced merger plans with Adobe Inc. in September 2022, a sign the company hasn’t been standing still while it waits for the deal to close.” On the acquisition: ​“The Adobe acquisition is scheduled to be completed by the end of March, though it may be hard to conclude the purchase in that time frame with at least one of the regulatory agencies likely to challenge the deal, Bloomberg Intelligence antitrust analyst Jennifer Rie wrote in September. Adobe may owe the design startup a $1 billion breakup fee if the transaction takes longer than that and the deal collapses, according to the merger documents.” (See the archive link.)

Peter Yang interviewed Yuhki Yamashita about building FigJam AI, creating a culture where PMs and designers love their craft, making design accessible to everyone, and balancing new and power user needs. Most of Yuhki’s advice in this interview is for PMs, but it still applies to any product designer. (The interview is paywalled, but there is a lot of good stuff in the preview.)

Love this story about FigJam’s early days: ​“We had a meeting with our board two months before we were going to launch FigJam. The board asked us what our differentiator was since there were many other whiteboard tools. And Dylan said, ​“Well, it’s fun!” But then we realized that the product wasn’t fun enough. So the FigJam team ran a sprint called ​“FunJam” to come up with all the playful features that you see today like cursor chat, emotes, and more. So you’re absolutely right – fun was a core principle. Most workplace tools are a little boring and confine you in a box. We want to give you an inviting canvas with many lightweight ways to express yourself.”

Harry McCracken published a big story about Figma and Dylan Field at Fast Company. It talks about Adobe’s acquisition and what it could mean for both companies, the future of design in the era of AI, the origin story of Figma, and their big ambition to ​“make creativity the new productivity”. 

Figma Data Scientist and Researcher paired quantitative and qualitative learnings to reveal a complete picture of how notifications work, and how users interact with them. ​“At the end of the process, they found where the biggest opportunity lay for improvement: Most users weren’t receiving notifications at all. To improve communication and collaboration, it would be a matter of creating new alert types and rethinking who received notifications (and when).”

Lenny’s newsletter and podcast are my favorite on all things product and growth, so I’m looking forward to listening to this interview! ​“Claire Butler was Figma’s first GTM hire and their 10th employee. She led Figma’s early GTM strategy from stealth through monetization. She also helped the team through the journey to find product-market fit and built the team that drove Figma’s unique bottom-up growth motion. Eight years later, as Senior Director of Marketing, she continues to lead Figma’s bottom-up growth motion, along with community, events, social, advocacy, and Figma for education.”

Behind-the-scenes story on how Figma scaled their performance testing system from a single laptop running in the office to a dream setup built for scale: ​“After considering a few different approaches, we ultimately decided to ship two systems: A cloud-based system would handle mass testing, covering our bases for the majority of situations, and a hardware system would be highly targeted, tackling situations that required more precision. They would be connected by the same CI system, and engineers across product teams would run the same suite of performance test scenarios across them.”

“Adobe Inc.’s $20 billion takeover of Figma Inc. is set for an in-depth European Union investigation over concerns the deal could harm global competition for software used by designers.” The EU’s in-depth probe is set to run until December 14th, so the future of the deal will stay unclear until then.