Adobe

“I think the challenge that India has is that India doesn't have the ecosystem that the Bay Area has, right? In the Bay Area, you had Adobe that passed to Google, who passed to Facebook, who passed to, you know, like, there's just this, like, legacy of learning…”

“The fund had built concentrated positions In AI infrastructure companies, including Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, and CoreWeave, while also betting against software companies such as Adobe.”

“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.”

“Like when I was at Adobe, it took them five years to go live in Salesforce.”

“You're seeing this right now with Adobe. There's an AI problem here. Had they not been so aggressive in pricing over time, would the customers be as willing to switch to new AI tools? It's an interesting counterfactual to think about.”

“The likes of Adobe, Microsoft, those companies, right? Those two They don't move as much until it's like a billion in enterprise value, right? Because it's just too small for them. So players like us are not attractive to them in general.”

“I looked at Adobe and I was like, this thing trades for eight times LTM free cash flow.”

“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 …”

“And at many traditional SaaS companies that have offered their own sort of metered usage, like in Adobe, you can now pay for Adobe by credits. It's still only like half a percent of their revenue.”

“But I do not believe Anthropic will ever build a direct Figma or Illustrator or Adobe competitor. They don't have to maim them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“ADP Took 20 something years to grow from a billion to ten billion in revenue. And then the next wave of companies like Adobe took about 20 years to go from one to 10. And then you fast forward in time and you have things like Salesforce or SAPs for an even mor…”

“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.”

“On a revenue basis, you know, it's an eighteen billion dollar a year revenue business. The NFL actually owns way more mind share than its revenue would illustrate. A strange statement to make is the NFL is an oddly small business for how large a role it plays …”

“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…”

“Bill.com is gonna be a stronger business, Or SAP is going to be a stronger business, or Adobe is going to be a stronger business because of AI.”

“So they buy them for 1.9 billion. It sounds like a lot, but it's only three times the next 12 months sales, even with a huge premium.”

“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 …”

“I was just a VP at Adobe for a little more than a year, but basically there were, you know, there were, there was unbudgeted discretionary and budgeted... But even I had a 500 K slush budget. Okay. And this was a while ago. So today it might be a million bucks…”

“In the video space, it's not like that. Adobe is very, very vulnerable As Premiere has great penetration across professionals.”

“Adobe After Effects and other video tooling, I think it kind of falls short, and it doesn't really cover, let's say, prosumers and individual professional creators. It only covers people who work in large teams.”

“I don't want to do click baits for you, but it feels to me that Adobe is in a huge trouble.”

“The default choice for every professional will stay with Google. No one ever gets fired by using Google models. I just guarantee you. The same with Adobe.”

“Is Adobe gonna sell as many seats if now you don't have to hire as many graphics designers? Or is Zendesk going to sell as many seats if the, Software just answers all the queries. Like, the answer is no.”

“I think it's like 30 or 40% lower than Adobe deal adjusted for time dilution and risk, 30 to 40% lower.”

“Like open AI is buying like a normal, buying like an Adobe or a Microsoft now.”

“Adobe on its last earnings called Adobe is, I mean, it has some AI tools in, in create creative, but it's not ahead of a lot of the competition. I think it said it had five billion of AI influenced revenue. What malarkey.”

“Various regulators did not like the deal and had arguments against it. No need to go into those and not, but yeah, the, it was a long process, 16 months.”

“Adobe has five billion of AI influenced revenue.”

“If you're a steel company or an airliner and you're in some commodity industry and you misallocate capital for 10 years, you go bankrupt. Someone takes you over. If you're Microsoft, if you're Adobe, if you have a very strong franchise and you don't necessaril…”

“I'm betting down at least 10%.”

“I find the Adobe product to be the most annoying and least understandable set of licensed products out there, right, which harassed me.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Adobe is now actually including Nano Banana slash Gemini 2.5 flash in Photoshop and Photoshop Express.”

“Adobe just trying to go to the cloud took three years of convincing everybody, okay?”

“Now Figma is going to IPO. And I would be shocked if they end the first trading day below the price that Adobe was going to pay.”

“Figma filed their S one Q one revenues, two hundred and twenty eight million. You remember they were going to get bought by Adobe before, before it got stopped. And they have thirteen million monthly active users, a billion and a half in cash, no debt.”

“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…”

“Our lawyers said that it would almost certainly go through.”

“They're really not. I mean... They're very focused on other aspects of their business, and that was made abundantly clear in the antitrust process to all the regulators, too.”

“Shortly after we did this interview, and about a year after the deal with Adobe fell through, Figma filed for an IPO.”

“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.”

“I think that there's this opportunity to basically for vibe coders to band together and to build free versions of Very popular legacy SaaS companies like DocuSign, like Figma, like all the Adobe stack”

“At that point, Quark was one of the leaders in desktop publishing, and Adobe had this vision for, you know, how do we create a brand new platform from scratch that allows people to, you know, do professional layout”

“In June of 98 you know, there was an economic issue in Japan. The company hit the wall. And, you know, we had to have a very significant layoff”

“Most leaders, and it doesn't matter at what level you're providing leadership you know, you have three things that you have to do. You have to create a vision. You know, and if you're a first line manager, you're creating a vision for the group. If you're a CE…”

“When the recession of 2009 hit We were a considered purchase, and so given we were a considered purchase, and potentially a discretionary purchase the revenue dropped quite precipitously, and when the revenue drops in a company that is software, which, as you …”

“The strategic decision to move to the cloud and the financial model in retrospect That may have actually been the easy one. Executing on it, because in parallel, we actually allowed people to buy the perpetual version or the subscription business. We had to tr…”

“When you had this secretive, I'm working on this, 12 or 18 months, and I can't talk to you because if I talk to you may not buy my current version.”

“So at the same time that we created this new model, we actually instituted within the company what we call a data-driven operating model. And the data-driven operating model talks about discover, Buy, discover, trial, buy, use, and renew. And it speaks to the …”

“Today, it's just the opposite. People are like, hey, here are some ideas. Either engage with your community, or even better, put it into the software, market it, and see what gets used. So we're going to continue to invest in that. And, you know, those, ironic…”

“If we create models, one of the things that we have to do is create a model where every piece of data that went into the creation of that model, we can testify to the fact that, you know, we have license to do that.”

“PDF, we just recently introduced AI assistant for PDF or Acrobat. You can have a conversational interface now with a PDF. The next step clearly is how do you do it across all of the documents, whether they be on your desktop or whether they be in the knowledge…”

“I think the reality with all technology, all automation is, you know, I, it introduces way more jobs, and it disrupts some, and I don't think AI will be you know, that different, and a lot of the, you know, automation or menial things that people do, it'll for…”

“The large language models, I'm sure you'd agree there'd be four or five people who have the capital to create those large language models, and, you know, there'll be maybe one open source, there'll be three or four proprietary”

“All these models are going to be a different form of platforms, and so, great. We should embrace that because, you know, you have to go to where people are, right? And so, I, at least I think of some of these models similar to how I've thought of operating sys…”

“Adobe does this. Literally Adobe does this. Like if you, they look for search terms, they create micro apps that funnels to their main apps.”