The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 54 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Adobe's Marketo is in terminal decay and heading to zero revenue
“It is going to zero. It is, but it is one of the slowest decays you can get, right? Because moving off a marketing automation system in the enterprise is very slow, but it is without question going to zero. There are no net new logos and everyone hates it.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe operates like a PE firm milking its users
“My vent on that company is they have milked their users for so long that it just feels a piece of financial engineering interacting with the product. It's always the login are crap. I don't even understand the licensing model. I don't even know what I can use …”
Lemkin: Adobe's $5B 'AI-influenced revenue' metric is misleading vanity reporting
“The worst offender is Adobe, okay? Because Adobe announced they had five billion of quote, AI influenced revenue this year. That, listen, let, Let's be kind. It's, I'm sure it's true. I'm sure they're using Firefly and generating images with AI, but to me, it …”
Lemkin: Regulators Made a Mistake Blocking Adobe's Acquisition of Figma
“I think, I do think the regulators got this one wrong, and maybe even they got it wrong, who knows, because of, this is why the Google HubSpot thing might be worse, and maybe it's how they were lobbied or manipulated, because I don't think it's competitive.”
Braze will win marketing automation over legacy giants Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle
“Braze. It's an incredible team and product in the marketing automation space. They are helping company large brands figure out how to engage with their customers and giving them a single view of their business across channel. And that's something that Salesfor…”
Lemkin: Anthropic will never build direct Figma or Adobe competitors
“But I do not believe Anthropic will ever build a direct Figma or Illustrator or Adobe competitor. They don't have to maim them.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe faces major AI disruption risk over the next five years
“So I think the disruption risk on those guys versus Intuit is a lot higher. Five years from now, there will be some disruption into, but we'll still be moving money around. We'll still be producing quarterly accounts, and I tell you, we'll still be paying taxe…”
Acharya: AI movie creation will be won by startups, not Adobe
“If you said something like, you know, software movies or AI movie making or sort of AI assisted movies, that's just not a category in which there is an incumbent, and I'm betting that a native company will actually win that. It probably won't be Adobe.”
Bendov: Early startups shouldn't hire big-company sales VPs from Salesforce or Adobe
“You know, I wouldn't hire that, like, high pedigree VP from Salesforce or Adobe or whatever. Salesforce is a great team. You need someone who's still hungry, scrappy, and will figure out the playbook, right?”
Lemkin: Adobe's $20B Figma acquisition would look like a great deal today
“You know, it also, you know, I mean, Scott Belsky was right. They should have bought him. People made fun of them for overpaying, right? Twenty billion, right? But I think the beauty is if you're Adobe, you can be a little patient. It's okay if you pay two yea…”
Hoffman: Derailed Adobe acquisition will make me more money on Figma
“I mean, look, I'm an investor and all the rest, and I think Figma is an amazing company that's gonna, gonna, I'm probably going to make substantially more money because the deal was essentially derailed, but there was a bad theory of the case.”
Hamid: FTC and Lina Khan did not block the Adobe-Figma deal
“I don't think, ah, a lot of us put a lot of the blame on Lena Khan, poor Lena Khan because, you know, in our own experience, that's not, that was not the issue for Adobe Figma. It wasn't Lena, ah, or the FTC, ah, there were other issues. So I think it's broadl…”
Lemkin: Canva is directly destroying Adobe Creative Cloud
“Canva is directly destroying creative cloud, ok?”
Adams: Canva operates in a different category than Adobe
“We really consider ourselves to be in a totally different category. Like, literally. When we started, design was something that one percent of the world could do, and we wanted to bring it to the other 99%.”
Belsky: Companies should only build AI models they can lead globally
“Actually, I think that's sort of the right answer is you should build models if you're the best company in the world to build them.”
Belsky: AI future will not be dominated by a few mega models
“I think it's actually common belief that there are going to be a few mega models in the future that are going to do everything for every company in the cloud. What we're saying is actually it will probably be the opposite.”
Belsky: AI hallucination is a feature, not a bug, in creative tools
“In, in some ways, listen, for some practices hallucination, hallucination is a bug, but in some areas it's also a feature, right? So if I'm trying to discover some cool new music, I mean, I can imagine that might be a feature as opposed to a bug. You know, whe…”
Belsky: AI platform shift uniquely favors incumbent tech giants over startups
“I do think we executed well, but I also think that there's some nuances of this platform shift in particular that do favor those companies that know their customer well and already reach them.”
Democratizing expert software increases a company's total addressable market by 100x
“And by the way, it also increases your market by an order of a hundred extra more, right? You know, we're You know, Adobe's building Photoshop for probably hundreds of thousands of people who want to, who are skilled or want to make design their profession, an…”
Randle: Adobe trades at eight times LTM free cash flow
“I looked at Adobe and I was like, this thing trades for eight times LTM free cash flow.”
Lemkin: High gross retention does not guarantee future growth for Adobe
“Just because your GAR stays high, just because your nominal churn is low, does not mean you're going to grow. And I see no evidence Adobe will grow. I see no, no products that show they'll grow.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe Acquired SEMrush to Launch an Answer Engine Optimization Product
“SEMrush, which is the king of search engine optimization for Google, got acquired recently by Adobe, and I think that acquisition only makes sense if their plan is as quickly as is humanly possible to introduce an answer engine optimization product, because th…”
Lemkin: OpenAI Now Purchases Software Like Traditional B2B Enterprises
“Like open AI is buying like a normal, buying like an Adobe or a Microsoft now.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe offers the most annoying, least understandable software licenses
“I find the Adobe product to be the most annoying and least understandable set of licensed products out there, right, which harassed me.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe has failed to land punches or stay relevant in AI
“And you know, for a while there, I was like, maybe Adobe will land some punches and be relevant. They were talking the right game. But they don't appear to have done so.”
Lemkin: Figma competed only with an abandoned $30M Adobe product line
“Figma was directly destroying a thirty million dollar product line that Adobe had abandoned, ok, with XD sketch or whatever it's called.”
Cassidy: Reps at Salesforce and Oracle Never Need to Prove Problem Validity
“There's no comps there for like Salesforce or Oracle or Adobe or whatever, right? You don't ever have to make that kind of case there ever.”
Rabois: FTC's Adobe-Figma challenge was standard antitrust enforcement
“Figma in some ways was easier case for the government in the FTC, which has been very aggressive than many other cases. You know, Figma Is competitive with Adobe's products. Like at the end of the day, that's not like a stretch where the FCC has been taking so…”
Belsky: Product designers are more important, not less, in the AI era
“It's not the technology that makes us successful. It's the user's experience of the technology that makes us successful. And that's why I think the role of designers is more important, not less important in this modern world.”
Belsky: Adobe never trains AI models on customer creations without opt-in
“We don't ever train our models off of the customer's creations. So, like, what the customer makes does not train our models, unless they submit it to stock and want it to train our models in which case they get compensated for it.”
Cohen: Netflix, Heineken, and Adobe signed with Navan during COVID lockdowns
“Our biggest customers would sign up with us, like, customers like Netflix, Heineken, Adobe, sign with us on these times where people were not traveling because, again, change management, The easy thing to do at that time.”
Mignano: Unbundled creator tools will inevitably rebundle into new verticals
“So I think it has to get unbundled and then rebundled again. Like I think one of these companies will successfully take a strong position in say video or audio editing, and they will never inevitably need to ladder up into a new, you know, leverage that streng…”
Logan Bartlett initially expected Braze to be acquired for $300M-$400M
“At the time I was convinced that the most likely outcome was that it was going to be a 300 or four hundred million dollar acquisition by sales or Adobe or someone like that. And so I felt like I had to be really disciplined on the entry price because it just s…”
Lemkin: Small acquisition safety nets are necessary for startup M&A
“No one loses their job in Adobe over the small chip deal. Otherwise it would never happen. No one would take any risk in buying an emerging company, right? They just wouldn't do it.”
Jason Lemkin: Figma's public valuation is 30-40% below Adobe's acquisition offer
“I think it's like 30 or 40% lower than Adobe deal adjusted for time dilution and risk, 30 to 40% lower.”
O'Driscoll: Only Two or Three Independent PC Productivity App Companies Scaled
“After 20 years of the PC wars, there was really only two or three companies at scale That were selling apps that were personal productivity apps independent of Microsoft. It was, you know, you had Adobe, you had Quicken and maybe some of the security apps.”
Canva drives higher web traffic volume than Adobe
“So I think Canva nowadays is much larger in terms of volume generated to the website than Adobe.”
Belsky: Adobe's design team led the early development of Firefly
“You know, we had our design team actually build a team within that did all of the early developments of Firefly. It was a very like design driven exercise to figure out the interfaces and how they integrated into the products.”
Belsky: Adobe recently re-centralized its design team into a single organization
“Recently I re-centralized design in one organization because our strategy, you know, required it.”
Traynor: AI will expand Adobe's market beyond creative professionals
“They could have a really significant expansion of people who could use Adobe software far beyond just creative geniuses.”
Howie Liu: AI Will Enable Both Adobe and Canva to Grow
“I don't think it has to be purely a, you know, winner takes all, you know, Adobe wins and Canva loses type of equation, right? I think AI could actually enable both Adobe and Canva to grow and to actually create disruptive experiences”
Tunguz: Adobe's generative AI capabilities are underrated relative to competitors
“Adobe I think is doesn't have doesn't have the recognition recognition it deserves. When it comes to using generative, I think about like the applications in Photoshop, they launched a product called Firefly. I think they're right there.”
Belsky: A working prototype is worth a hundred meetings
“I deeply, deeply believe in the fact that a prototype is worth a hundred meetings, and if you can have a discussion around a PowerPoint with bullet points and stuff, I mean, you're gonna miss so much”
Belsky: Iterate MVPs with data until the next strategic transformation
“When you build that MVP and put it out there, you should be iterating based on data from there on out until the next big transformation where you have to lead with some intuition.”
Belsky: Set objective success metrics before launch to avoid post-launch bias
“You know, I mean, listen, you have to set metrics, objective metrics, of what you believe progress looks like up front for a few different reasons. First of all, you know, as the messy middle Is you get lost in it, right? And along the way, the progress you're…”
Belsky: Intuition sets product direction, while data guides execution
“Intuition is what brings you to a mountain to climb. Data is what helps you climb it.”
Belsky: Startups lack funnel reach while incumbents lack modern tech stacks
“You know, startups have the opposite problem. They are working on the most novel news Stacks of technology. They're all building, you know, web apps or AI natively, et cetera. However, they don't have any top of funnel, whereas Adobe has this massive top of fu…”