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 is shifting sales onboarding back to in-person, classroom-style training
“We're also moving to classroom style. In person. And, you know, in the COVID days, we kind of got away from that, but we're going back to classroom style. We're going back to in person.”
Demos test candidate perseverance while discovery reveals curiosity, says Boscanian
“And personally, I'm much more interested in how they do, frankly, on the discovery side of that, because I think, you know, it's probably a little bit unfair to expect someone to be doing this amazing demo of your product with just a few days of playing around…”
Figma shifted its SDR team to manage small transactional renewals
“Recently we made a new shift, and we said even that we're gonna kind of take the focus away from, and we're using them now in a more pointed way on existing customers and managing small you know, transactional renewals to get those off the plates of some of th…”
Figma's net dollar retention rate recently increased from 131% to 136%
“We added five points on our net retention, pretty significant when I think went from 131% to 136%.”
Stebbings: Figma reported $1.2B ARR and 40% YoY growth in Q4
“Figma came out with their Q four, 20, 25 earnings. They were very good. Accelerating growth at 1.2 billion in ARR, growing 40% year on year versus 38% year on year in Q three, so up there. Amazing retention of 10,000 dollar plus customers, 97% GRR, a 136% NDR.…”
O'Driscoll: Figma trades at 10x forward sales with over 30% growth
“It's still a twelve billion dollar market cap company. It's still growing. Yeah, it's still trading at 10 times forward sales, growing at 30% plus.”
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.”
Randle: Mamoun Hamid's top wins combine B2B software with consumer engagement
“If you think about his huge, huge winners, whether it's Figma, Glean, Rippling, they all have like a common through line of the, you know, it's B to B software, but it's almost like consumer like software that, that demands really high user love and engagement…”
O'Driscoll: Carta data shows 18% of 2018 Series Bs returned over 5x
“What it told people for listeners is they looked at all 547, 2018 series B investments, and then they did a histogram of where they come out in less than a one X, you know, one to a two X. Oh, that was series B. So 547, and then, you know, 20, 18% of them grea…”
O'Driscoll: Netskope won't see a massive first-day IPO pop like Figma
“The answer, of course, is no, because I believe, as I said earlier, in reversion to the mean, and Figma had the largest bounce of any large cap IPO since, I think, 2000. So I sincerely doubt they'll copy that.”
Halligan: Zendesk never secured long-only investors due to shaky IPO timing
“Zendesk at the time went out. And it was just, it was timing, and it was just a shaky week that they went out, and they just didn't get, they didn't get the big long onlys, and they had a good story, and they didn't get them, and they never really got them. Th…”
Figma Will Likely Price Between $20B and $25B
“It's probably going to, we'll see where it prices, call it 20 to twenty five billion.”
O'Driscoll: Four VC firms will each return $1B from Figma
“The reality of four VC firms, each making a billion dollars, that'll focus the mind.”
O'Driscoll: Figma was uniquely positioned to execute a direct listing
“It's actually one of the few companies that could have done it, it's profitable, so it's not sitting there. I mean, one of the reasons you don't do a direct listing is either you need the capital, they don't, or you have this existential dread of screwing up y…”
O'Driscoll: Figma reached Rule of 80 with 40%+ free cash flow margins
“And you didn't even mention one of the more impressive ones, which is kind of the profitability and free cash flow margins last quarter, like, 40% plus. So, upping positive, free cash flow positive, growing 46%. So, again, rough math on an iPhone on a small sc…”
O'Driscoll: Figma will IPO soon rather than stay private
“My guess is it totally makes sense for them to get a great IPO under their belt. In a way that, and not do the strike thing of stay private for another three or four years.”
Mohan: Windsurf skips early Figma design stages when building apps
“Internally right now, when we build apps, we're not very, very quickly going to Figma at the very beginning if the app can be built Very fast inside.”
Hacker: Duolingo would have rejected chess course without working AI prototype
“If it had just been a Figma design, we probably was like, ah, you know, ah, maybe, maybe not. But the prototype was. So good that it convinced everyone.”
Yamashita: Designers present idealized mocks in portfolios instead of production screenshots
“There's still a strong disconnect between what people design and what ends up in users hands. And for me, a thought experiment is next time a designer shares a portfolio with you, are they sharing the designs that were beautiful mocks? Are they sharing the des…”
Yamashita: Polish core user paths first, skip perfecting speculative features
“If you're perfecting details for a critical part that it's going to help you understand how well this product is going to do in the market, then by all means. But if you're starting to kind of perfect these areas that are much more speculative or areas of the …”
Yamashita: Tangible prototypes convince stakeholders far better than theoretical pitches
“Building something tangible that people can use convinces people more that this idea is tenable.”
Yamashita: Figma's perfectionist culture requires pushing teams to ship
“For example, at Figma, we have a culture of everyone wants to get the details right, so sometimes we have to encourage people to be comfortable getting something shipped.”
Yamashita: Figma's internal culture relies heavily on undocumented tribal knowledge
“It's still a very tribal knowledge. You know, you kind of have to know this random nuance here, which is why, you know, this backstory, which is why we can't do this. And sometimes that prohibits some of the new people from being able to get to a better soluti…”
Yamashita: Figma tracks user reliance via ND7s, targeting 5 days weekly
“Our first product, Figma Design, has always set the bar for what it means to be a kind of tool that people are deeply, deeply reliant on. That's kind of the golden standard... We call it ND sevens, like how many days in a week? That people are using your produ…”
Yamashita: Adding headcount does not solve product integration challenges
“It's not always the case that throwing more people or resources at a problem makes something go faster, and I say this because we just launched a bunch of new products, and perhaps the hardest problem still is how do we make them connect better, and making the…”
Yamashita: Dylan Field mapped design Twitter graphs to recruit early users
“One of the first things he did was he took design Twitter, he visualized it as a graph, and then figured out which people designers are following the most, and then went to those designers to get feedback on Figma and get them excited about Figma. And that was…”
Yamashita: Users created 3.5M presentation decks in Figma before Slides launched
“Before our Slides product, three and a half million decks were being made in Figma design, even though it wasn't intended for it.”
Yamashita: Software Tools Differ From Consumer Apps Due to Unpredictable Behavior
“Some of these are pretty sophisticated products, and the kind of interesting thing about building a tool is a tool is very different from, like, a typical consumer product where, you know, there's a funnel and you're trying to optimize the metric. Like, you're…”
Goldberg: Great companies expand TAM by increasing product surface area
“I mean, if you look at, you know, I was very fortunate to see some amazing companies from index from the early days, whether it was a Figma, whether it was a whiz, whether it was a data dog companies that, you know, have been able to build TAM by just increasi…”
Hamid shares entry valuations for Slack, Figma, and Rippling
“Probably Slack, I would say, you know, even at the 250 post that's, you know, with all the dilution over time and, If you take the twenty-seven billion or some other number that's a, obviously, a good, great multiple. Figma, you know, the initial investment wa…”
Hamid: Slack and Figma created entirely new software market categories
“Slack created a market. In some ways, Figma created a market. There wasn't a notion of collaborative design software.”
Hamid: Early Figma data showed designers using the product 15-18 days monthly
“You just saw that designers were using the product 1516, 1718 days out of a month.”
Hamid: Sketch and InVision were significantly larger than Figma early on
“But Sketch and InVision are way bigger than Figma for a while.”
Grady: Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid is an exceptional deal picker
“Somebody who I really admire is Mamoon at Kleiner. I think Mamoon has an exceptional track record of investing in companies that are not at all obvious at the time. And I think about the series B in Figma, which is a round that we looked at and passed on. I th…”
Grady: Figma had $4.6M ARR at Sequoia's Series C
“So the series C and Figma, when Figma had, I think, 4.6 million of ARR, that was not at all obvious, but Andrew had spent three years Studying the design market and had a real point of view.”
Rauch: Next-gen apps like Notion and Figma will look completely different
“So if I have to create the next notion, the next superhuman, the next figma, My bet is that it certainly is going to look completely different because before I would reach for what I would call like software one point no solutions.”
Figma was at $4M ARR when Sequoia invested at $400M valuation
“I remember when they, it's public, but they were at four million in ARR when Andrew did them at 400.”
Late-stage startups spend roughly 3x more per seat on Figma than Slack
“And so how that actually plays out is probably a third of the company from my surveying has paid seats inside of Figma, and they pay about three times as much as they would for something like Slack.”
Grimshaw regrets missing early investments in Figma, Plaid, and Scale AI
“Dylan at Figma, Zach at Plaid and Alex at Scale, and I have enormous respect for all three of them got to know all three of them really early, and I just, I struggled with it.”
Startups with network effects should hire growth talent earlier to engineer loops
“If your product has a social collaboration, network effect, that kind of thing, think about Slack, LinkedIn, right, or anything like, or Airtable, Figma, hiring for growth early on, a little bit earlier, will allow you to engineering those growth loops into th…”
Early sales leaders should meet weekly with founders and own the agenda
“So what I learned early that I think the founder and that sales leader should be meeting at least weekly is my expectation for an hour, you know, at minimum, I think going into that, and this is a general framework that I follow for all the people in my team i…”
George: Front-end engineers doing design expands Figma's market by 10x
“Our view was that all front end engineers in the future will engage in design, and this is 10 X plus bigger in terms of market opportunity than just defining what they do in the design space.”
Libin: Digital collaboration tools unlock productivity from introverted team members
“When we went from being in person to doing all of these things, you know, we no longer do brainstorming in a big conference room with, you know, stick stickies, post-it notes, you know, now we do it all on Figma, and actually I started noticing, man, I'm just …”
Dylan Field: Cross-platform plugins must perform best on your platform
“That said, a lot of the plugins that we're seeing are across many different tools. And so it's not just enough to make it so that a plugin exists on your platform and people use it. But you also need to make it so that the plugin works best in your platform.”
Dylan Field: Power-user features should never compromise basic user experience
“You keep things simple, and I think that especially later in your product life cycle, the requests you get are dominated by power users sometimes, and they're asking for more power. You can't forget that the reason that became a power user in the first place i…”
Dylan Field: Platform-first strategy takes longer initially but scales faster later
“I think it might take a little bit longer to go platform route, but then you have this sort of opportunity to back into scale it faster.”