HN Distilled

Essential insights from Hacker News discussions

Figma files for proposed IPO

Original Article

Hacker News Discussion

The Hacker News discussion about Figma's IPO filing reveals several key themes regarding the company's past, present, and future.

Figma as a Technical Success Story

Many users express admiration for the technical achievements and engineering prowess that underpin Figma's success. The company's ability to build a best-in-class design tool in the browser, emphasizing performance and a custom rendering engine, is frequently cited.

  • "The engineering they did upfront (primarily led by co-founder Evan Wallace) that set the stage for their success is the stuff of legends." (btown)
  • "Evan Wallace basically said screw it, I'm writing a custom WebGL renderer and multiplayer protocol, when everyone else was slapping together existing libraries. Most of us would have built a janky Electron app and called it a day. Instead they went nuclear on performance because that WAS their product differentiation." (1zael)
  • "The brilliance of the system he built was that it allowed for real time collaboration. Which was a god send from the Sketch -> Zeplin -> Invision -> Avocode (version management) ‘stack’ that lost Enterprise design orgs were using." (F7F7F7)
  • "Evan Wallace is, in fact, a legend. A true 100x-er. There's still parts of the codebase basically no one at Figma really understands that Evan wrote back in the day." (hiphipjorge)
  • "Figma made handoff much easier. Made version control dead simple. Made my life as a UX leader much much better." (F7F7F7)

Transition to Public Company and Concerns about "Enshittification"

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the implications of Figma going public, with many users expressing concerns that this will lead to a decline in product quality and user experience, often referred to as "enshittification." This sentiment is fueled by past experiences with other tech companies that have gone public.

  • "The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the public markets on retail." (rvz)
  • "Going public is usually terrible news for users." (StableAlkyne)
  • "Prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of people looking for Figma alternatives." (rvz)
  • "Figma's enshittification started back when there were talks of Adobe taking over, it's already bloated beyond reason." (Zealotux)
  • "Figma just has to jack up the price in order to appease Wall Street quarterly. Business wise it's got a great margin, but the avaricious nature of Wall St. will force them to enshittify the entire product, the engineering doesn't matter unless Wall St. is satisfied." (colesantiago)
  • "The shareholders are vastly more important than consumers as we all sadly know." (esskay)
  • "Then investors start to realize they bought at IPO price, then they start asking for more profit to shareholders. And you get Adam Newman style behavior." (Panzer04)
  • "The alternative is enshittification of the entire product lineup to include ads, exorbitant subscription prices, reduced functionality along a painful price gradient, morphing into a dopamine social product, or a goal to rent real-life assets for to an increasingly impoverished population." (zenonu)
  • "What's the "Figma but not enshittified" at the moment?" (andybak)

Skepticism about Figma's Business Model and Strategic Focus

Some users criticize Figma's business decisions, particularly its diversification into areas perceived as outside its core competency and the introduction of features behind enterprise paywalls. The company's handling of features like "variables" and its development of products like "Slides" and "Buzz" are questioned.

  • "There are several things designers need that Figma has dragged their feet on for years, and when they do release them, they’re usually behind the enterprise paywall. Or they don’t release them at all, instead opting to build some horizontal product like Slides because their investors want a bigger TAM." (danielvaughn)
  • "They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited." (diegof79)
  • "They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts." (diegof79)
  • "The company's business model and their general focus as a company." (danielvaughn)

User Experience and Technical Gaps (Rendering, Fonts, Responsiveness)

A recurring theme is the discrepancy between how designs appear in Figma and how they render on actual web pages. This is attributed to various factors, including font rendering inconsistencies, the use of absolute positioning, and the inherent differences between design tools and web browsers.

  • "And thats how you get designers whining that their design looks great in figma but not in a real webpage." (snickerdoodle12)
  • "I've been fighting the way figma interprets fonts for years. It's not too bad at my current company, but at my last company things would look great in figma but with the exact same styles applied they'd be wrong in every browser." (zdragnar)
  • "There's also a lot of ways that figma can lead designers down the unhappy path. They'll put together two different screens that look great, wave their hands around the idea of "just make it responsive" and when you go in and look, there's nonsensical crap like absolute positioning on elements, or arrangements that don't work with block layouts and force you into convoluted grid stuff." (zdragnar)
  • "Figma is clearly built to be useful for web development. It has tons of gaps that lead designers off the happy path." (zdragnar)
  • "My solution in these cases was to build prototype sites that sync in real time from the figma file. So the designer can see how their work actually looks, and treat the figma view as just a low fidelity preview." (stevage)

Alternatives and the Search for "Less Enshittified" Tools

In light of concerns about Figma's future, users are actively discussing and recommending alternative design tools, with an emphasis on those that are open-source, self-hostable, or perceived to be earlier in their product lifecycle and less susceptible to aggressive monetization.

  • "If you’re tired of it all, and the inevitable, and you have agency, try penpot.app." (pixxel)
  • "Also Sketch [1]. Everyone abandoned it when Figma became the pOpUlAr tool, but I still use it every day, nearly 15 years later and it's continued to improve." (rglover)
  • "Penpot is the most solid alternative I know of at the moment." (Lalabadie)
  • "Beyond Penpot and Excalidraw, check out Sketch (Mac-only but mature), Lunacy (offline-capable), and Plasmic (code-focused) - all with different trade-offs but less pressure to monetize aggressively." (ethan_smith)
  • "Consider and find and fund open source alternatives. I know of excalidraw and perhaps penpot are there anymore?" (colesantiago)

Figma's Financials and IPO Implications

The discussion includes an analysis of Figma's financial disclosures, with particular attention paid to revenue growth, operating expenses, and net income. The significant increase in R&D and operating expenses in 2024, largely due to stock-based compensation related to RSUs, is noted. The decision to go public is seen by some as a move to allow investors and employees to cash out.

  • "Their highlighted metrics page: $821M LTM revenue, 46% YoY revenue growth, 18% non-GAAP operating margin, 91% gross margin." (btown)
  • "Headline financials: revenue | $505 | $749 | 48% ; gross profit | $460 | $661 | 44% ; op ex | $534 | $1,539 | 118% ; net income | $738 | $(732) | (199)% ; free cash flow | $1,041 | $68 | (93)%" (granzymes)
  • "What happened in 2024 that caused their operating expenses to increase so much? Mostly a 356% increase in R&D... And most of that increase came from a one-time charge from allowing employees to sell their RSUs." (granzymes)
  • "The company is turning into a crypto investment fund which just happens to provide a SaaS design tool." (cluckindan)
  • "It’s the other way around, they bought some bitcoin because they are going public for the meme stock value." (drexlspivey)
  • "When they go IPO, will you guys buy it immediately, expecting it to go up? Curious what people think about the figma's future." (system2)
  • "The public mostly oays for the final exit. Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?" (crossroadsguy)
  • "At my company we use Miro a ton. It doesn't have the design tools, just the white boarding and diagramming, so its Figma counterpart is FigJam. But the realtime collaboration features are just as good, and sometimes better." (atombender)

Concerns about AI Integration

Figma's recent foray into AI features is met with mixed reactions. Some see it as a necessary step to stay competitive, while others view it as a distraction from core design functionalities or a poorly implemented addition.

  • "The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others)." (diegof79)
  • "Their new "AI" feature is a bolted-on POS." (insane_dreamer)
  • "I find it kind of ridiculous that I need dev mode to get some values that they expose outside of dev mode but in a less dev friendly way. I know there's more to it, but come on..." (dawnerd)
  • "I don’t like what they’re doing with AI. They should focus on enabling UI/UX designers to do more instead of making a glorified Dreamweaver." (lvl155)

Other Themes

  • Legacy Design Tools: The discussion touches upon the decline of older design tools like Adobe Fireworks, Sketch's continued relevance for some users, and the reasons behind the shift away from tools like Axure.
  • Founder/Engineering Acumen: Evan Wallace, a co-founder, is repeatedly praised for his foundational engineering work. However, there's also a debate about the maintainability and understandability of "brilliant" but complex code.
  • Company Culture and Practices: Figma's past interactions with other companies, such as the trademark dispute over "dev mode" with Loveable, are mentioned, highlighting certain business practices.
  • Financial Holdings: Figma's significant holdings in Bitcoin ETFs and its approval for further Bitcoin purchases are noted, prompting speculation about the company's financial strategy.