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 171 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 9 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
Figma sets average enterprise sales quotas at 3x to 4x OTE
“An average enterprise rep here might have three to four X their OTE for a quota, and we're happy with that.”
Management frequently sets sales quotas too high, admits Figma CRO
“I agree, with the exception of, what if we got it wrong? What if we got the quota wrong? What if we set it too high? And that happens. It truly does.”
Prioritize deal-closing experience over industry domain knowledge when hiring sales reps
“I, if those are the two options to choose from, I would take the person with the experience doing the deal, because I think the industry experience you can teach with, to the person who's got, you know, the right willingness to learn and the curiosity, and obv…”
Candidates who pit competing offers against a company pose retention risks
“If at the end of a process, you know, with Figma spending a couple of weeks doing all this work if you're not like, all right, I'm in. I want to do this. It tends to be a little bit of a yellow flag for me. And if they're actively trying to pit you against a, …”
Figma operates without a traditional customer success team, says CRO Boscanian
“We don't actually have a traditional CS team.”
Figma operates without traditional sales development representatives, says CRO Boscanian
“We also don't have traditional SDRs.”
Figma CRO has a visceral negative reaction to jumpy sales resumes
“I have a usually a pretty visceral reaction to people who are super jumpy, you know, in terms of a resume.”
Rajaram achieved a 500x to 1,000x return on his Figma angel investment
“Five of, between 500 and a thousand X at the time of IPO, but it has sadly gone down since then.”
Clements: Accel is not in Figma, calls company oversold
“We are not a part of Figma, but have a lot of respect for that company. But I know that Dylan is a generational founder, and it's a very important company with an incredible financial profile, and it just feels for a lot of ways, for a lot of reasons, oversold…”
Product designers will abandon static pixels to design directly in code
“I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things.”
Jason Lemkin: Public software multiples jump sharply above 20% and 30% growth
“If you're growing less than 20% of a cherry pick basket, 5.1 X AR, Wix is lower. It's not in my basket. 20 to 30, 11.8 X AR. And then the 30% plus, which is Rubrik, Palantir and Figma, average 23.7 X AR, but Palantir and Rubrik push that up.”
Randle: Figma investment at 100x ARR generated a 30-40x return
“One of the first hundred X deals, I think, in SaaS, and people were like, a hundred X ARR, what the hell? And obviously it ended up being, you know, I don't know, 30, 40 X, unbelievable investment.”
O'Driscoll: Figma's 250% IPO pop was largest since 1999
“Instead of getting, let's call it, the designed 15, 20% pop that makes everyone feel good, you ended up with this absurd 250% pop, right, which is clearly off the charts. I mean, I think it's the largest pop since 1999.”
Halligan: Figma CEO Dylan Field decided IPO pricing, not bankers
“The founders make the decision on what the price is. So Dylan decided at the end of the day.”
O'Driscoll: Figma IPO Buyers Set Exit Price Targets Under $110
“All those big buyers who came in at Figma at 38, before they buy, they have an internal process with a price target to exit. None of those price targets are going to be more than a 110 bucks a share.”
Index Ventures Is the Largest Shareholder in Figma, Dream Games, and Wiz
“Largest shareholder in Figma, largest shareholder in Dream Games, largest shareholder in Wiz you know, second largest shareholder in Scale.ai, Revolut.”
O'Driscoll: Figma will price well and pop on its IPO
“My sense is it's hard not to imagine this thing pricing and then popping very well because the structure of how they went at it is such that they will almost certainly be that money left on the table feeling”
Mohan: Design-to-code tools address a tiny fraction of software engineering
“The things that the lovables and figmas do as like maybe a very small fraction of what software is. Like ultimately, like most software is not just like a website that, that it has like some backend attached to it.”
Yamashita: Figma's early Make Design feature merely matched prompts to templates
“We had worked on some AI features the year before, which at the time we had called make design, where you can go from a prompt and it would generate some designs on the canvas. And it was a pretty simple feature. You write some prompts and then it would use so…”
Yamashita: Code is the primary source of truth in Figma Make
“In Figma make, source of truth is code, and we figure out how to take your design, translate it into code, and then let you iterate via code, because code is so expressive.”
Yamashita: Observing User Hacks Reveals Real Signal for Product Roadmaps
“It's important to observe how people hack your product, you know, use that as inspiration, because that's real signal, right? They're going out of their way to demonstrate to you that they have a need, even though you're not delivering on it.”
Yamashita: Gap between design and production code is primarily a bug
“I would say it's primarily bugged today. Perhaps at times masquerading as a feature because I think designers are always designing ahead, right? So they're always thinking about v one, v two, v next. And so as a result of that, it is natural for the designs to…”
Yamashita: Future product building tools must support multiple entry points
“The future has to be one where there are many entry points because building a product is just necessarily this very Complex, multifaceted thing.”
Yamashita: Products requiring tutorials to explain value signal design failure
“All too often people end up kind of having to walk people through, okay, this tutorial of like, let me just explain to you why this product is better. And to me, that's not just a story. It's also kind of a constraint in the design. Like you're maybe not pushi…”
Hyatt: I passed on pre-launch Figma due to high valuation and check size
“Mine is Figma. It was quite a while ago now. It was still pre-launch, so it was trying to write like a very large check pre-launch.”
Hamid: KP's Figma deal was contentious at $500k ARR and $110M valuation
“You know, actually Figma was quite contentious. Yeah, it was, yeah. Because to your point, around like half a million of AR at a 110, 15 post, whatever it was at the time it was really like the same thing. There's Envision, there's Sketch. This company's been …”
Kaz Nejatian: Figma survived its failed acquisition by acting like it never happened
“Companies that usually, like, usually mergers that fall apart or acquisitions that fall apart end up with in a really bad place because companies just typically have checked out by the time the acquisition happens. Figma is thriving. And I think they're thrivi…”
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.”
Grady: Sequoia looked at and passed on Figma's Series B
“And I think about the series B in Figma, which is a round that we looked at and passed on.”
Brenner: European regulatory intervention by CMA stifles innovation and competition
“Too much regulations could just gonna stiffer innovation. And what we've seen here, where they just extrapolate them, making up their own opinions with CMA and in firms of Figma maybe competing in the future. I think it's totally wrong and it was stiff for com…”
Will Wu: Product teams should prototype with code, not just Figma
“I'm a huge fan of rapid prototyping, like not just creating interactive Figma mockups that you can click on, but literal prototyping with real software code so that you can just rapidly experiment and feel out using your intuition and your instinct”
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…”
Stebbings: Allocating reserves based on early traction misses generational enterprise companies
“What's working often is unsustainable, and it's your sneaks, your figmas, your big IDs, which actually may take a bit longer. But you wouldn't allocate to them if you were doing it on traction.”
Stebbings: Portfolio enterprise value is a bullshit metric for VC funds
“I think the enterprise value of, like, portfolio companies is Total bullshit though, too, because it's like, I could invest in, you know, Figma and the Series E. Fair enough. And then it's like, we've created thirty-five billion dollars, and you're like, come …”
Basu Trivedi passed on early Figma rounds for lacking product-market fit
“This comes back to my bias around wanting to see some early signs of product market fit before investing, and Figma did not have a launched product. Before its first couple of venture rounds.”
Figma Equity Is Virtually Guaranteed Value Compared to Unknown Startups
“200,000 dollars of equity at Figma is going to be very different than 200,000 dollars at Maybe a small company that doesn't have a good chance of success. And is probably either going to get acquired for a nominal amount or just fizzle out because you know wha…”
Herzberg: Figma and Notion have executed the best recent sales strategies
“Figma and Notion. Community first. Welcome sales assist. Impassioned user base.”
Figma's $10B valuation is just the floor for the company
“You know, we're now a ten billion dollar company with the most recent fundraise, but we also genuinely think that that's just the floor. I mean, Figma is going to be a massive company and we're just getting started.”
Hire a sales leader before expanding to three or more reps
“I think if you have hit some level of product market fit, you're seeing traction. You know that there is a market to go grab, and it's a speed game. And like, we need to go do it fast. And you're like, I think that we can support having five salespeople, even,…”
Dylan Field: Scaling companies cannot operate fully synchronously or fully asynchronously
“I think to scale, you can't really be all sync, because then you have challenges around how you communicate and how you make decisions, but you also can't be async, otherwise you lack connection, you lack spontaneity.”
Dylan Field: Figma aims to own the complete design lifecycle by 2030
“I think that there's an opportunity for us to totally own and support the design process and life cycle. So everything from idea to mock-up to research and consolidation to prototyping all the way production.”
Lauritsen: Legora still uses Figma for design system consistency and UI standards
“We still use Figma, yes. I know where you're going with this. As soon as you start building a system that's larger than something very small, you want consistency, and you want to have a design language and all that kind of stuff, and so you need somewhere to …”
Stebbings: Sold Figma position at a 40% loss
“While you guys were doing my Skydio, I just sold Figma, 40% down.”
Figma supports 500,000 customers with roughly 300 quota-carrying sales reps
“You've got a half million customers you're trying to support with, I don't know, 300 quarter carrying reps, whatever the number is, like, you're pretty freaking efficient already.”
Most Figma sales reps operate a traditional enterprise sales motion
“SMB, that's the PLG motion, everything else is sales led. Everything else we do, mid-market, enterprise strat, which is the majority of our team and the reps that we have, it's running like a very traditional SaaS sales business.”
Figma has never organized its sales force into industry vertical teams
“At Figma we to this day have not actually done any type of like industry based teams”
Figma requires sales candidates to complete practical discovery and demo exercises
“So we always make people do, you know, a challenge or an exercise at the end that requires some heavy lifting in terms of like learning a bit about our business but also showing off your, you know, basic sales skills run discovery.”
Figma enterprise reps focus on account expansion over net-new logos
“The job of a sales rep, they get their book of accounts, right? And every year we've created more focus around them and we've done, we've had to do ruthless prioritization on like which accounts are we going to really go deep on. But once they get their accoun…”