Big Technology Podcast - How Figma Caught Adobe By Surprise — With Carmel DeAmicis

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

Carmel DeAmicis was the 20th employee at Figma, a startup that Adobe just acquired for $20 billion. A former journalist and editor at Figma, DeAmicis saw the company rise under the nose of Adobe — the giant in the space — and eventually grow so fast that Adobe acquired it in a defensive move. In this week's episode, DeAmicis explains how a startup caught a major, established company by surprise. And why changing design culture played a big part in it. You can find DeAmicis on Notion.

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. Recently, you might have seen in September, Adobe, which is the preeminent design company, acquired his company, Figma. For $20 billion, it's one of the biggest startup acquisition deals of all time.

And it took a lot of people by surprise, including Adobe investors who immediately sold the stock a bunch and helped tank that stuff. And in some ways, it was an admission that Adobe had been vested by this company, Figma. And it really went against the narrative that we have that Big Tech will always crush the little company. because actually it was Figma that turned the tables on Adobe. I think it's a really interesting story, really indicative of, you know, what can happen when the market actually does its thing. And maybe some of the bigger tech companies, and I admit that Adobe isn't, you know, on Google or Facebook side,

but what happens when bigger tech companies can let their guard down? So we're going to talk about it today. And joining us all the way from San Francisco is Carmel Diamiesis. She used to be an editor at Figma, was employee number 20 there. She worked on the blog, marketing, com strategy, internal comms. And she's also a friend of mine, a former reporter at Recode, Giga-Om, and Pando Daily. So her success rate of picking startups is much better at than her success rate at picking news companies because two of the three went out of business.

But anyway, this is really going to be fascinating. And as you can tell, there'll be some good banter because Carmel and I go back a long way. And I'm lucky that A, she has seen Figma from the very beginning and B decided to come on and talk about it. Carmel, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Alex. This is pretty wild. If you had told me when you were advising me not to take the Figma job, that this is where we would be five years from now, I would have thought you were crazy. Yeah, same here.

And you had told me that, oh, this is a design company. And I was like, okay, don't do that. And you had this opportunity to become like a partner. at a public relations firm and I think the money was better and it was a company that I'd heard of versus Figma and I thought okay maybe take that safer route since you had already you had a nice track record of being at companies that failed anyway I was wrong I think that PR firm also no longer exists so that you know path between to path through a four is two past to diverge by, wow, that's getting lucky this time.

Right. And the, yeah, the Carmel Curse is actually not a thing, which we learned. The Carmel Curse. You also have a, well, anyway, we might get into your other career stops, like the fact that you did this viral report on a meat factory in Dubai for Dubai television. Alex wants to prove that he can help me hit $7 million on a very old, unfortunately, at least on my viral video. Okay.

This thing could go off the rails quickly. So let's start talking about Figma. What is Figma? Because for a lot of folks, you know, it will be the first time really digging into what this company is and does. That is not new to me because when I joined Figma, nobody knew about it. So at this point,

I think the tech industry has cottoned on, but it's still why the hell did Adobe buy this company that half of us have never heard of question. It's a UI design tool, which means anything digital that you might interact with, your Uber app or you go on Google, maybe even your Tesla dashboard, is probably designed in Figma, sort of like Photoshop, but for anything that's interface or virtual. So it's just... Video, no video.

So we're talking, you know, more static or, you know, minimal motion. So is it just UI, like people designing apps there? People like do Photoshop style design there as well. It's definitely started to grow, but initially it was interface design. It's built for that. That's what the features are for. But more and more creatives have gotten their hands on it. So we have started to see a lot more illustration, really crazy detailed illustration.

Beautiful stuff happened in Figma. But that was not the initial purpose. Yeah. And I see Paki McCormick, who's the author of Not Boring, do these Figma photoshopps. But maybe he's not the best reference point exactly for. figuring out what the app does or web app does. So for my understanding, so Adobe has, you know, has the set of tools that you would imagine people would design UI

and Photoshop Illustrator, et cetera, et cetera. But Figma decided to build a competing tool and do it differently, right? It said instead of building this in software that you would download like you would and Photoshop and Illustrator, why don't you just use it on the web in the browser? And can you talk a little bit about how that was possible and why the company made that decision? Because it ends up playing a pretty big role in its ability to really challenge Adobe for its life afterwards. It was a really risky decision when they went down this path, which was, you know,

company who started roughly 2012 and from 2012 to 2015, there was a lot of testing and experimentation. and pretty much before that point in time, it actually wasn't possible to build a design tool that would be fast enough on the web or in the browser because browser technology had not come far enough. The advent of something called WebGL allowed for that. And so that, you know, opens up the design process to all these other people

that previously were stuck just receiving like a static file or like checking a static file after a designer had already made whatever changes they wanted. And so, yeah, that was the biggest shift. But I would say that Adobe was not completely on top of the UI design market either, regardless of whether you're talking about a design tool that's a Google Docs in the web versus not. And why does it open it up to different people?

It's just like Google Docs or, you know, if you use any kind of web-based tool, you're able to be in the file at the same time as someone else. You're able to make live changes and they're seeing the changes made live on their, And it's the kind of thing that we've become so used to in the remote COVID era because we need it. Whereas when Figma first started in 2012 or 2013, it wasn't necessarily the norm in a lot of different industries. I don't even know when Google Docs was launched, but that felt like that was one of the first big moments of people realizing how different it would feel to work on the web versus just on your local computer with others. Yeah, it was the mid-2000s. And Google made all those acquisitions.

It's kind of interesting because Google made all those acquisitions that ended up leading to docks and sheets in the early 20, mid to early 2010s. And it was just as Microsoft had this, this strangled hold on the desktop. Yeah, chokehold, stranglehold on the desktop. And Google was really reliant on Microsoft's browser at the time, which is interesting. So they basically said, we're going to create these programs on your browser that are going to challenge your tools, such as Office. And of course, Microsoft kept the browser slow, and that led to Chrome. You've read about it because you helped me work on edits in my book, always day one, but this is something that's in there.

And is this kind of similar for Figma when it comes out and says, okay, we can do this collaborative design. Obviously, the people had been, well, not obviously, but I imagine the people had been working in Photoshop before, So it gave them an opportunity to replace Photoshop for UI design. So actually what they would have been working on in would either have been fireworks, which was Adobe's first attempt at tackling the UI design industry a long time ago. It was a big inspiration for Dillon, the CEO of Figma.

But eventually they shuttered that project. And so actually it was a European company called Sketch that exploded. And Silicon Valley did not pay attention to that most UI design was being done in. because it was one of the only design tools purely focused on that. And at some point in Sketch's history, Adobe then released something called Adobe XD, which was their version of trying to tackle that problem. So, you know, depending on when you're looking at Figma's time history,

it would have had different competitors. Adobe XD had not captured the market by the time that I joined Figma, Sketch had this sort of unknown, I think it's like Norwegian or something like that company. But otherwise, the story is somewhat similar insofar as when I joined Figma in January of 2017, I was really confused that this didn't already exist for designers. I am not a designer. I'm a writer. And I couldn't have worked with editors or other people without Google Docs. And so it kind of blew my mind that design was so behind the game.

The difference being designers hated the idea of designing in the browser or on the web initially. They did not like the idea of the file being open and accessible to anyone. And so even in January 2017 when I joined Figma had been around four or five years, but we hadn't released to the public until the year prior. We were fighting this uphill battle of trying to convince designers it wasn't the end of the world if other people can get in your file while you're still working on it and it's not this perfect final product. Yeah, I mean, my first job was a marketing job and I remember, you know, working with designers. And I was a marketing manager. I'll tell you, there was no way they were letting me into their design file. It was strictly like, write the creative

brief, hand it over to folks, let them work. And then they return a final product. You give feedback. And you can't say make this bigger or smaller. What do you have to say is make this more prominent or less prominent or, you know, I really like it to feel this way. And then you let the designers go ahead and do their thing. They very much do not like being told by non-design folks how to design. So that being said, how did Figma get designers into the idea? that there could be other people in the window while they were designing. When I first joined, we hadn't. And so I'll never forget, you know, I joined Figma thinking,

this seems like an obvious, duh, to me. How does this not exist? And I really love Dylan and the team that interviewed me. And then I interviewed my first few designers, my first week on the job. And one of them messaged me when he saw the Adobe News. And I basically said, you know, what do you think of Figma? I was working on a story about design systems. And he was like, I mean, I would hate the idea.

of designing in the browser. And that was my first, oh, shit. Am I allowed to curse in your podcast podcast? Yeah, you can. That was my first, oh, shit, moment of, you know, I never would have thought that would be a future people did not want. And so that's where we were starting from. And it meant that we had to really invest in building community

with the design community. We had to get to know people. We had to bring in people from the community who could be our evangelists. We had to encourage other evangelists. And we had to listen really closely to what they were saying about what they wanted, even if the entire foundation of the product was not actually what they wanted. And so that meant, I mean, there was a whole range of different programs that we did from bringing in designer advocates at different stages who are now a core part of our sales process.

It's a huge team now to bringing me in as a journalist to work on content because they didn't need the kind of growth SEO content at that point of time. And what they really needed was storytelling and brand storytelling to earn designers trust that we were really thinking deeply about the design process. And we weren't just some outsiders trying to completely take their control away. The irony being, once you open up the design process, then designers all of a sudden rise in power and company. And we were seeing that to become more part of the leadership because everyone can be involved and they can be involved earlier. They're not just the polish on top of the end. Yeah.

So I was going to ask you, who else was in the design? process with them. And is it mostly apps or websites or everything? I mean, it's evolved. So you know, back then it was digital. So that apps and websites. Now we've shifted to a world where almost everything is digital in many ways. Like your car dashboard is digital, right? You're, you have an Alexa screen if you have the visual Alexa. And so very glad we turned off my for the interview. And so, so it's evolved and it's gotten bigger and bigger this sense. of digital UI or where you can change, you know, your product at any point in time after you've already shipped it to people. Very different from physical. And so back then, it was much smaller

companies or is the one-off designer at Microsoft. We had these two guys from Eastern Europe that were our Microsoft users in like 2017. And we begged them to do a case study with us that couldn't get cleared by all of Microsoft. Now most of Microsoft is using Fignac. So it's really evolved over the years. But, and as we talked about, it's becoming also, it's moved into illustration and these other areas, brainstorming, PowerPoint, things that we didn't think back then. But that's changed since 2017. So you would have like CEOs coming in and product leaders coming in and saying giving instant feedback versus waiting. And I imagine UI is something that changes very quickly. Like for instance, Facebook back in the day used to push various changes.

every day. So is that what it's what it was like? And so the way the design process used to be Prefigma was often, you know, leadership and product managers would come up with a vision for something. They would rough sketch it out. Then they would sit with the design team who was supposed to do pixel perfection, you know, make it look beautiful, everything, you know, you remember from the switch to the iPhone era. And then the design team would work on that. And then they would send back a file or it would be, you know, on a, you know, a shared server, but you couldn't open it when they were also in it. There were all of these limitations. And so, you know, it really meant that the feedback was happening in this discreet,

a couple checkpoint review kind of way. Whereas when Figma came in, it's this living URL. Once you've shared it with someone, they can jump in at any time. They can jump in while you're live experimenting with it. They can leave comments at any time. And so obviously that can lead to chaos and can make things a lot harder. But it also enables designers to be even a part of the brainstorming from the very beginning in a way that they weren't before Figma, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does because I'm thinking back to my marketing meetings and it would be like I, the marketing manager would have a meeting with all the stakeholders, write up a creative brief, and then send it to the design studio. Whereas like if they were just there, there'd be a lot less

telephone. Right. And they're trained to think about user experience in a way that like we always relegated them to pixel perfection in tech. But they're trained to think about how people choose things and things like that. But if their tool is closed off, then that means their knowledge is closed off. Yeah. And so all these factors are probably like why I was like maybe you shouldn't do this. And then there was also the aspect of... You were traumatized. Like also, yeah. And the question is like what was the total market, total addressable market? Because it's not like it was designed completely. It was UI. And so, I mean, we're going to go forward and then we'll go backwards a little bit. But the UI market, the UI design, the UI design market to be $20 billion

market that seems, you know, astonishing. Like, what is SNAP's market cap compared to that? You're going to have to look that up. 13 billion. I mean, 13 billion. So, so why is this such a massive market? Well, I think if you're thinking, well, for one thing, if you're thinking, of it just as UI design, you're already thinking too limited in terms of the threat that Figma posed to Adobe. Because once you teach creatives or show creatives what it can be like to work in this more open way, and once they get more comfortable with that, then that means they want that for their Photoshop where they're editing memes and photos and things like that. They want that for illustrator where they're doing, you know, cool print design. They want that for in design,

which used to print newspapers, you know, even Premiere, which is video editing. once you show that that is a better way to work that's going to give you more power and more say in how things are made and also brings more people into your process, you know, it's a runaway train at that point. And so I do feel like Adobe bought Figma in part for that market threat and in part for the fact that it could grow its business because all of a sudden you have people who are willing to pay for design tooling that were never the designers, that were. never part of the process that didn't have the technical know-how. You know, it used to be you could open up a PDF of a Photoshop file or in design or whatever and see what the newspaper was going to look like and, you know, maybe you print it out and write on it. You know, now we're at a point where if you have a web-based tool, then you have all these other people that want to pay to be a part of it, even if they're not actually the designer. So that's the first big opportunity

to grow the design market past, like, people with the technical know-how. Fascinating. So it's interesting that it's culture, right? Culture is really the change here. It was a software that changes culture inside organizations versus software that, you know, necessarily, you know, just on the fact that it was cloud alone is what helped Figma gain success. And in fact, I think in Adobe's announcement blog, they talk about community a lot, which probably seems maybe confusing or like, oh, that's bullshit to someone who's on the outside and doesn't really understand. But what are talking about are these values and these norms around openness and design that didn't exist before, even among designer to designer, you know, because it just wasn't possible. It wasn't

technically feasible and that had sort of structured, yeah, the culture that design worked in. So you join and there's 20 people there. Tell me a little bit about the company you walked into. It was wholesome. And that struck me as a big surprise because this was January 2017 and I was a tech reporter before that along with you. So we're coming hot off the heels of the bro Uber culture scandals, or maybe they were just starting to break, actually. I feel like 2017 was when I watched all of you spend so much time having to chase down Uber. You know, Airbnb, you know, WeWork was starting to bubble up. And so Figma was a stark contrast to that. And I felt really comfortable and saving and sort of cared about, which is, I know, you know, silly to say, but, you know, I have stories

that back me up. So from the beginning, it felt like a, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, from the beginning, it felt kind of like a group of nerds that really cared about what they were doing and geeked out on it and geeked out with each other versus what was happening in Silicon Valley everywhere else at the time. And the CEO is, what, 22 years old? He is a T.L fellow, Dylanfield and was he a college dropout or something like tell me a little bit about him my understanding is that he dropped out roughly at 20 and uh for those who don't know he was one of the first generation of teal fellow so he got a hundred thousand dollars him and his co-founder evan wallace uh to start figma from peter teal and uh by the time i joined he was 23 or 22 his mom came

a month into my job there and brought cupcakes to celebrate his birthday. So that was the moment I realized. I knew he was younger than me, but that he was five or six years younger than me. And so it meant that he didn't have any, you know, preconceived notions about how to run a company or what to do. And that really impacted Figma's early culture in a positive way from my perspective. We didn't have these norms or established systems that we were trying to build towards. we were able to build exactly for our users and us and where we were, which also made things more chaotic, but that's the creative process. So I like that. Right. And it starts tiny and then starts gaining more and more market share. So I imagine it's part of this voice towards community.

But when did you see it maybe hit an inflection point from being like, oh, this idea might or might not work to, oh, this idea is working? So, you know, I'll confess that as a writer, I was not paying that close attention to the business metrics. They were really open about them from the beginning. I would mostly just get the analysis feed from Jamie Wong, who was one of our earliest engineers, like, tell me if I need to be worried. Otherwise, I'm just here to do my job, and, you know, I'm not paying that close attention. But the shift really happened around the time that we switched offices, so it felt both

like this symbolic shift in terms of going from this beautiful office, but had that had all these really horrible problems. like I can tell you really funny stories about our series B fundraising that was just a mess. Okay, wait, wait, no, no, we're not going to pass that and not here. We literally, so they were doing construction in front of our front door. We're on this alleyway in Soma, downtown SF, and, you know, there would be just piles of gross things in front of it.

They wound up doing construction in front of it for like a month straight, which meant that the only way to get into the building was through the dumpster entrance. So we literally had to lead these fancy investors for our series B, which was before Figma was what it was today. Our series B was probably our most on the line, will we or won't we make it round, squeezing past like gross slime, the smell. Oh, gosh, I'll just never forget it. They're in their suits.

Oh, man, you know, like they're buttoned down, you know, as fancy as we dress and as that button downs and like nice slacks and nice. And they would just get this look on their face. And I knew the timing of it was not great, but it was very memorable and pretty funny. We all laughed about it really hard as it was happening and later because of, you know, dumpster diving for VCs doesn't kill your business, then it makes you stronger. Right. And then, but the customer side of it as well, like when did, when did it seem like, you know, it was a struggle? It went from, there must have been an inflection point for you where you saw, okay, it's a struggle to get these, you know, few designers on to like. holy crap, now this is becoming industry standard.

I feel like the inflection happened two years into my time at Figma, maybe two and a half. And it was subtle at first, kind of like whispers. It went from, you know, half the time I'd meet a designer and they would never even have heard of Figma. You know, maybe I would just be cold calling people for stories we were working on or I would meet them at an event or something like that. Then it went to all the designers know about Figma and we have a bunch of hardcore supporters, but a lot of them are still unsure.

And then there became this shift where it wasn't just the designers that knew it was everyone in Silicon Valley. And that one was a slow growth from, you know, the product managers knew. Then the CEOs and the founders knew. Then the salespeople or the people that don't even touch design, you know. And then it reached a point where it expanded beyond. And it was people that I met that lived in Colorado during the pandemic or, you know, the final chapter of this. is when the Adobe News was announced, my dad texted me to say that my 83-year-old

aunt had saw the news in the newspaper. And I'm like, she never understood what Figma was the entire time I've worked here, but it was a front page of her paper, and that's crazy. Yeah, so how did, so what do you think it was that made that switchflit? Okay, I think it was several factors. It was building momentum, for one. Figma started in 2012 or 2013. They were in stealth.

making sure that they had a product that was fast enough that designers wouldn't immediately scoff at for three to four years. They didn't actually launch to the public till 2016 a few months before I joined. I joined in January of 2017. So in my first few years there, what we have is we finally have a product that anyone can get onto that anyone can use. Does it have all the features that designers need and have gotten used to especially UI designers? No, my first two years we're building those and we would use our launch points as an opportunity to tell a story. about where we saw design going. And those would go viral. So we weren't paying for marketing, but we were able to go viral with good storytelling and with like tapping people, relationships

in the community that we had built to help share whatever the launch was. So more designers start hearing about us and start trying. Then I think there became a tipping point where it was almost like most of Silicon Valley finally tested us and we were good enough. And it was a Figma. It was one of our launches, and I can't remember exactly which one, where it blew up as our previous launches had done. But in this case, all the design teams got in and tried it and found that it finally met the standards of what they needed. So Silicon Valley starts to really get on board. And then the final push was COVID. I mean, in the pandemic, all of a sudden, this old way of working with these localized files did not do the trick, especially when the rest of collaborative

software had progressed so far that people were used to working in this like no way. walls kind of way. And so, you know, then you really saw us being adopted by markets that were always a question mark, like the, you know, consumer goods markets and things like that. And so that was the final, you know, push. But we were getting there before that. And then COVID sort of, the fact that we were, people, people were suspect of working in that way, but then COVID forced them to work in that way. And then they realized working in that way was actually a lot better. So then they don't want to go back and there's nobody else that does what we do, what they do. I did technically leave in February of 2021.

I don't know if we recap that at the beginning, but obviously my heart is still with Figma. Carmel Diamiesis is with us. She is former editor at Figma. As you can hear, she worked on a lot of the blog positioning, some of those posts that went viral. She's a former reporter, Recode, Giga, Ome, and Pando Daily,

and also some channel in Dubai that will remain aimless. There's one part of this story that we haven't spoken about yet, but we will in the second half. It's all about how Adobe saw this community building and this takeoff happening and didn't get its act together to compete. So we will talk about that right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show,

a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now.

And we're back for the second half of big technology podcast. Carmel Diomis is with us. She is a former editor at Figma, former reporter at Rico at Giga Ome and Pando Daily. One of my good friends, always love talking technology. with Carmel, among other things. And I'd like to hear from your perspective, you know, there's a big rise, obviously, very fast rise. What that heck was Adobe doing? And why wasn't it competitive? And by the way, like, I just had a conversation about this on CNBC. And maybe Nate, we can drop it in. I think in the short term, again, you're going to see some good things. My worry about is the long term.

Think about what just happened to Adobe, right? But that is a long term. They're getting market share from doing that. Yeah, I agree. And it can look that way in the near term, but the long term, you can end up having issues. Again, I'm going to point to the Adobe example. You know, they were the only one in the game. And then out of nowhere, right?

How quickly did Figma come up? Because they weren't reinventing quick enough. And now they had to make this deal that ended up hurting the stock because it was defensive and they needed to do it. So I think that with these companies, it can look good in the near term. And I understand they can take market share. There's a way to capitalize on these moments. It's a question whether they do it or not.

Okay, so there are big companies. We think that they're going to make every possible investment, and they don't. They fail, and it's either they forget to see the competition, or they just decide not to invest in an area of, you know, potential weakness, you know, when they could have because they don't want to. So what was going on with Adobe at this time? defined this time are we talking January 2017 well the whole time figma was rising wasn't there a fear that this was going to you know be taken over by Adobe copied and then destroyed there was and there wasn't we talked about that a lot in the early days um because Adobe had so much money Adobe had not faced real challengers to its design business in so long and it's been around for decades and if it

did face challengers it bought them up and they were small enough that it wasn't a threat and so So it had a lot of money, and we did wonder, yeah, could it just decide that web was worth going after? Right, because you would imagine that the cloud becomes something that companies become interested in, but not in Adobe's case. Right. And Adobe does, it calls itself the creative cloud, a huge swath of its products, right? So it was attempting to own the messaging, and I think maybe a lot of people didn't realize it hadn't fully owned the market because the marketing was misleading. And so, one, it's not easy to build on the web. It did take, as we talked about, years to create Figma before it launched.

And so it's not an easily, you know, complicated feature the way Snapchat Stories is for Instagram or something like that. I think the second thing, as we talked about, was web technology was not ready yet. And as Figma was being built, it was getting there. What would that have taken for Adobe to realize, well, one, they would have had to be paying attention. to web technology, they would have had to be tuned in and think that that would be a market threat to their business when they really had never faced a market threat that was web-based like that. And you kind of have to invest in the technology and believe it'll continue progressing, you know, and that it'll get to a point where it could be a fast design tool in order to then

pursue that opportunity. Third is that it was UI design. And there actually were already, like I said, sketch companies that had decimated the UI market. Adobe XD had users but Sketch. had the bulk of the users, and it didn't impact Adobe's bottom line. They were still bringing in a ton of money from all of these other companies. So I think there are really good reasons for why they weren't feeling threatened. And I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in that 2017 to 2022 growth, Adobe did try to buy Figma. And Dylan just said, no, the leadership, the CEO. To be clear, I don't know if they did.

I'm not maybe to some kind of insider knowledge. I was going to ask, what was the internal stance on selling? The internal stance, I mean, I was shocked when I saw the news that we sold because for as long as I've been at Figma, Dillen had always said that the goal was to go public. And in the beginning, every founder says that because they need investors to believe that. But usually at some point in the growth, if they're willing to sell, they sell for a billion or they sell for $2 billion. Figma had reached a size where, one, we were valued so highly that who could afford us. And two, Dylan had already become a millionaire. And I'm sure so had Evan. And Dylan had then gotten into the crypto art space. There was no money motivation that often gets other

founders to sell when they don't want to go at the distance. So I do think this moment came as a big surprise to all of us. And yeah, I'd be shocked if Adobe hadn't tried to buy us at a previous point in time. Right. And so, but, you know, still, I guess I would imagine that the collaboration part would be of interest to Adobe. You know, even if it wasn't UI, why wasn't that built more deeply into their products? And when you say the creative cloud marketing was misleading, were they still largely a download software that fancied itself as something more? Yeah. I think their version of cloud was you had ways of updating files and folders that was, more accessible or cloud-based than it had been in the past.

But it was not a web-based tool, as we often think of, cloud products. Cloud could mean many things. So they were using that. So you wouldn't be collaborating in Photoshop, for instance? In real-time? No. Could you send a file? Yes. But in real-time?

It's not really cloud. Yeah. No. Yeah. And so I think, so why weren't the interested in that market? I asked this question a lot at a certain point in Figma's history. And the answer was they had experiment. with more collaboration features, even in that version of a, you know, hardware-based program where it's not on the web. But nobody wanted it.

Designers didn't want it like we talked about. They said, why would I ever want to open that process up? Why would I ever want a CEO dropping in and seeing it what I'm doing at 2 a.m. in my fury and then leaving all these comments that throws me on track. And so I think it makes sense that even though they had experimented with more collaboration features, they got pushback from their market. And Dylan and Evan did not start out as designers. Dylan had a design internship, but, you know. Who's Evan, the co-founder? Evan's the silent co-founder. He's our, you know, he's not there

anymore, but he was there for a very long time, including while I was there. So they were both engineering background more traditionally, although Dylan had some more design experience. And so I don't think they were limited by these preconceived ways of doing design that the market was. So Adobe tried from when I talked to it. They're like, no, they tried stuff. They tested things. They did user groups and the answer was no.

Interesting. I just want to go back to one thing. The more we talk, the more I still can't believe that designers said yes to this. I mean, it is community building, but it's also just like, how did they get past this idea that someone was going to be in their stuff? So kicking and screaming for some of them. For some of them. Was it a purchase that was driven by the design?

or by the people up top? No, the designer. Yeah, especially when we got bigger. It was driven by the designer. So I think initially it was, you know, one person, one designer. It was often we'd have an evangelist at every company. Not on purpose. There would just be one person that saw the vision and wanted to design in a more open way,

wanted to design in a more accessible way. And they would start advocating for it on their team in the company with whoever, you know, the people that buy the software tech at the C-level C-suite. level. And so, you know, they would pull people in and we would try to come up with light ways for them to do that, like little games or little baby reviews they could do where, you know, they're not trying to convert their whole team to Figma immediately, but they're testing it. They're trying to, you know, introduce it comfortably. So. Right. And it's probably the more experimental folks that would be willing to try at first versus

the entrenched, you know, don't, don't do anything but design the traditional way. Those people were probably, you know, native Adobe folks. So when Adobe came to them and said, hey, try this collaborative tool, they were most likely to be like, no, whereas like someone who could use Figma, you know, might be naturally more open-minded and that's essentially how it got pushed through. So that sound right to you? 100%. And we invested in those people in a big way.

And so, yeah, I mean, one of our first hires on the marketing team was a designer advocate, which was someone that was well known. We were very local and small at this point. well known in the SF tech industry, had a lot of designer friends, and we hired him to just have a foot in the door to even showing them Figma. And then he would throw these like game nights that were like we'd play Figma Pixel Pong where designers would have like design races in the product on a Friday night. And we'd throw these events that were ways of getting in the product that wouldn't activate the nervous system. You know, I'm, you know, I'm in, I'm in trouble mode.

And so he was one of our first design advocates. And then later we grew that design advocate program. And I think now, I mean, I don't even know, it's 30 to 40, maybe even more size big of choosing people in the community who are those evangelists, like they love Figma, they see the promise of it. So we brought some of them internal to be our translator. So then we would really pay attention to what these evangelists would say. We would really listen when they would give us product feedback. We would bring them into the company to meet people and feel like they actually had faces to names and involve them in our product development. It's a little bit ironic because we started the company building this thing no designers wanted, but then the way we

kept it going and grew it was by really paying attention to what designers wanted once we convinced them they should try this way of being. And so the design advocate program is huge. And then, you know, all of our marketing was a pretty community base. So I would run content at various points in time in addition to the product launches and I would work really closely with someone in the community on some story they wanted to write dissecting Tesla's new UI. or we would involve them early in our testing of a feature and then if they liked it

or well even if they didn't like it we'd then sometimes adjust the feature or change our product roadmap based on that then we would get to ask them to help with the marketing not in a heavy handed way but just in a hey this launch is going out like if you were comfortable tweeting it we'd really appreciate it we're spending no money on marketing at this point in time

and so yeah we were able to kind of co-develop with those evangelists in a way that empowered them to feel really even more excited about Figma and, like, continue evangelizing it. What do you think about the Adobe testing, did Adobe get wrong? Because you mentioned it, Adobe does have a lot of money, right? So there's this belief that, you know, a big tech company with a lot of money and can sort of brunt force its way through market and startups don't have a chance today.

So, but this seems to tell a different story. What happened? Well, I think you have a future. that isn't easily replicatable. So it's not as simple for Adobe to just launch the web-based version and let people try it out and see if people use it. You'd have to actually invest more time and money. You have to really believe in it to some extent, even if you have a ton of money. Two, the foundational thing is that we built something designers didn't think they wanted. And then when they got more used to it, they decided they did want it. And it gave them more power and more

accessibility and we ensured that it had the features that they needed and the things that they were asking for. And so, you know, I think you'd have to be, it's not like, it's not like Instagram ripping off stories from Snapchat. It was clear when stories came out. That's a popular feature. Everyone's leaving Facebook and Instagram or whatever to go to Snapchat. Instagram's like, fine, let's just rip it off and let's try to eat the business from Snapchat out from under it. there is no business eating out from like eating the business out from under adobe there's no one really challenging their market share um you know there's this until it's too big right there's this idea that you could explore with web and collaboration and they do and designers tell them no so what would be

the impetus to then explore it if you're not being forced to you know um and then by the time thigma got bigger when we were in like 2018 2019 that was when i really thought oh they're going to do it they're going to go they're going to have an exploratory team they're going to pursue web And they didn't. And all I can think is that it's so counterintuitive to their business model. All of their products are not web-based. They would have to start from scratch with every single product if they're really saying we think web-based is the future, right?

And so to take that stand when Figma was, what, in 2018, like $4 billion, maybe ARR, again, I didn't pay that close attention to the numbers. So, you know, I'm like rereading recaps of news articles to remember. there, you know, there isn't that pressure until we hit 2019 and it grows a lot more. Then we hit the pandemic in 2020 and all of a sudden, you know, and so the threat in some ways was building, building, building, building. And then the rise of it was so fast that you couldn't actually rip it off in a second, you know. Yeah, it sort of reminds me of the move to cloud where Microsoft had this on-prem server

and tools business that would do like storage for and server work for companies. in their offices and all the CIOs that Microsoft was working with told them they would never move to the cloud because moving to the cloud would mean that they would get fired and or lose a lot of their power and so Microsoft didn't do that initially because they had this stakeholder group that really didn't want things to change and then and then Amazon took the lead and then Microsoft eventually realized that like did another study and this is also an always day one did another study and realized. oh, these CIOs are either

going to flip back on their word or they're going to get fired because there's only one way the future is moving and it's moving towards cloud. And then Microsoft reoriented itself. Actually, Saty and Della, who was running server and tools at the time, read that report, reoriented the division to push towards cloud.

That's where Azure came from. And now Microsoft is a solid number two. And it was able to make that flip. But it's very, very difficult to say, are customers are wrong, which is what Adobe's customers effectively were. Right. And they all moved to Figma. Especially when you add on to the fact that Adobe has not faced these threats,

the way I feel like the Googles and the Microsofts and the Facebooks of the world are constantly dealing with, you know, these threatening incumbents, sorry, these threatening competitors, they're the incumbents. But Adobe was just really, I think, maybe smart with their acquisition strategy in terms of buying up companies when they're smaller. And so, yeah, they haven't faced that kind of challenge. And so I could understand, even when I was at Figma, it's still wild for me to look back and realize how much it took off. It felt like it could, but who knows it, it was a very big risk. And so, yeah, I don't necessarily. And Adobe, I mean, in the end, they did, you know,

they did bias. They got their opportunity and they did. And so I think they're very smart for that. not only because of the threat, but also because of the growth opportunity, where all of a sudden, like we talked about, you can have these people that are willing to pay for a design tool that aren't designers. Right. And what was interesting, though, is once Adobe did buy Figma, the market, just take the stock because they're like, oh, you missed a major opportunity. And the fact that you had to do this shows your business is not as strong as you or we believed. And I don't know if that's totally true because there aren't other competitors, right? Right. There is a bit, like there's canvas, but that's consumer like PowerPoint slide type of thing. And so it's not quite the same. Yeah, but the stock tank for a reason. And I think maybe that is a perspective on the culture of Adobe or, you know, the fact that everyone's asking if these bigger companies are able to innovate. And the answer is yes, until it's no. When you have to spend $20 billion on a competitor, maybe the answer's no. Yeah. But I do have, I think what all it really took is like being open to.

web and investing in web and them buying Figma to me, they're not going to shut it down. You don't buy something for $20 billion to shut it down. No, they had to do it. They had to do it, but now they're ready. And they could then expand video. Can you imagine video? Well, maybe

you can't, or maybe you can't. Video editing collaboratively. I worked in video journalism pre-being a tech reporter and it's very frustrating to be stuck in this contained space of premiere, which is owned by Adobe, when you're used to working collaborative.

So I do think there's a huge market opportunity for them. And in some ways, the investors should be a little more excited about that when you would have thought Adobe had grown to its max potential, you know? So here's a question. Do you think that Adobe's culture can handle? I mean, really, I don't think they're going to shut the company down either. That would be absurd. But the question is, can this non-collaborative culture,

well, not a culture not used to building collaborative apps on the web, can it then take this Figma approach and apply it everywhere? Because I imagine that part of it is, you mentioned it in the release, right? Part of it is now that, you know, Figma has, Adobe has bought this community of designers with Figma, it's going to want to apply it elsewhere. So. Right. So I wonder, do you think, you know, because you must have watched Adobe closely when you were there. So do you think?

We watched sketch and envision more closely. I'll be honest. Like Adobe was kind of an afterthought because UI design for them was an. afterthought. But they were, they were, you know, yes, we did watch them. You paid attention to them. Do you think that they have the ability to change their culture and make it one that's, you know, more geared towards the users of Figma than the traditional Adobe user? Because that requires a full reinvent of how you do business. I think it'll be really interesting to see what they do with Figma in the first few years.

And to the extent that they let it remain autonomous while they're closely studying it and in deep conversation with all of the people building it and understanding exactly what it took to build a web-first tool. Don't have to be politically correct here. I know. No, I don't know to some extent. I think the person that's the chief product officer

at Adobe, it's this guy named Scott Belski, he's really widely respected in design. Dylan really respects him. Yeah. Scott is like well liked and well respected. I'm sure he was very like a deep part of the conversations with Dylan about the acquisition. And so I have hope. I have so much more hope for Adobe buying Figma that they're going to learn from it and be able to apply it than I would our first biggest competitor that had a ton of money, which was Envision.

Or even Sketch because Sketch was this European company that didn't have the, these growth pressures. They weren't venture-backed, all these things. They didn't have this need to innovate. Adobe does, right? Like their stock has been struggling, like a lot of the stock market for the past six months, even pre the Figma deal. And so they have a desire and a need to make use of our learnings to be able to grow their user base. But it's also just been around a long time and it hasn't been challenged. And that I feel like feels like my biggest question of like, it hurts to change. Change hurts. It hurts internally. It hurts personally. And so are they willing to go through that discomfort and the hurt to accept a new way of being that

they need to be? I can hope, but I don't know, you know. Yeah. By the way, I just don't think naming your company sketch, even if it's a company where you do sketches is a great idea. English is not the first language. But they were beloved, you know, and I will also say for Adobe XD, designers really liked it. Like when I first joined Figma, a lot of them were like, XD does the job for me. It has the features for UI. You know, it's not as uploaded as Photoshop, like it does what I needed to do. Why would I try this, like, web-based startup I've never even heard of? And so that to me is promising. Like, they're still doing design right in some ways, even if they haven't really had to force themselves

to change. How will fig mates, is that what they're called? Yeah. Like metamates. Oh, God, I remember when they sent out the survey and we had to like vote on like pitch an idea. I'm like fig-y, like no, like fig Newton. Oh, God. Yeah, figmates. So how will how will figmates adapt to being inside Adobe? I think what figmates care about the most is the user that when I went back for the Okay, but come on, Mike, because that's so cliche. Yeah, it is. I mean, I want to know how they're going to be in this big Adobe culture.

So how are they going to adapt? You know, Adobe will tell you the same thing about the user. There's two different cultures, no doubt about it. Okay, so no, I know that. But you know some of my behind the scene stories where you know that I'm not just bullshitting you. I know. I know. Yeah. Um, and so they care, Figma care a lot about craftsmanship. Um, you get a lot of people who work there that are coming from a design background. And so I think if Adobe gives them continued autonomy to do

right by their users, where they get to actually follow the user input that they're getting. They get to actually build the business around that. Even the community and the marketing is all baked into that. Then I think Figma will integrate really well. If Adobe uses Figma as like the learning opportunity. I think if Adobe tries to squeeze Figma in and make it the same as the rest of Adobe, that's where you could really lose the magic, you know? And so, yeah, like laugh all you want. But, you know, when I showed up at the happy hour after the news was announced,

you would have thought all the people that were early with me that could, this could be financially the biggest moment in their life, we're kind of like, yeah, yeah, I just want to make sure that we figure out how to make sure our users are heard and we hold space for them. And that's behind the scenes, you know? So I know what you mean. I was a journalist. I know that's what that's what everyone says, but I do actually think like the desire for craftsmanship is very high. It's a design company and that wound up being a core part of our principles. So anyway, that's my thoughts. I think if they try to learn from Pygma, there's a lot. I think if they try to squish it in and make it just like Adobe, you know, immediately try to integrate it

into the creative cloud without giving their space for the learnings to percolate, then, you know, it could be a mess. Okay. No, that's a good answer. I didn't quite see where you were going there. Sorry for giving you hard time. No, that's okay. The last question I have for you, what can we learn about the way that the market and the way that big companies and small companies interact from this entire story? I mean, we're really living in a world. And I'm not going to go to bat for the big tech companies, but we do live in a world where people sort of throw their hands up and say, well, they're big. So we're toast. And if they go on the offense, then, you know, might as well not compete. Is there a lesson about that from the Figma story? I mean, it's tough because I think the first lesson is can you build technology that is defensible?

How can you tackle a problem that actually, if you get the solution right, is difficult to rip off? And I don't think there is many opportunities for that out there. And you have to invest a lot up front and hope for the best with those. So I do think in some ways those are becoming the bolder risks to take. because if you just build a feature like going live as Mirkat did back in the day you'll just see Facebook rip it off and Twitter

and all of a sudden nobody even remembers Mirkat so I think that's the first thing is that as technology has evolved that's become the bigger opportunity or the bigger risk to take and that's hard because you don't know if you're on the right path until you're five years in so that's one I think the second is sometimes they're not going to realize

you're a threat until it's too late And you look at that with TikTok and Facebook. And you know I've been obsessed with TikTok since January of 2019 or earlier. You really picked two winners. Yeah. But I've also picked losers. Like I was really into Yikak and like wrote all the big profiles of that and then Yik Yik Yikok did not pan out. Anyway, so I think it's all luck is what I was saying there.

With TikTok, you know, they knew it was doing well. But there were so many people that didn't like it, right? Because they're like, oh, it's lip syncing for T. I was on it in the lip-syncing for teenagers era. There was so much more potential and there was growth happening among the teenagers era. I'm honestly shocked that Facebook would dismiss it for being lip-sync for teenagers because they like love teenagers. That's their big, you know, growth market or whatever. Well, what happened?

Once you reach a certain inflection point with growth and community involvement and, you know, users, then they can't catch up and that inflection point can happen very quickly. It can happen. For Figma, I think it happened in a year. happened in a year, from, we're not a threat to, oh, my God, we're a huge threat. And so when you, like, try tackling something new, you know, there's something to be said a little bit for taking the shot still, I think, even though I know we have plenty of examples of major companies, taking out the little guy early. Maybe don't pursue PR. I like how this avoid PR,

and then that meant I think we also helped us fly under the radar for a long time. I think that's a great idea. Don't talk to Alex. on his podcast. Camel, geez. If you have an exit that's large and want to come tell the inside story, we always welcome you. And if you want to wait and risk that, you know, maybe I'll have you on one time down the line. And that's also okay.

Worked out for Carmel. Could work out for you. We have some beer. You need a little, just, you know, not too much. Exactly. So, Carmel, you work as an independent editor now. You want to talk a little bit about that? Sure, yeah.

I'm a writing coach, speaking coach. an editor. And so if you're stressing about having to give a speech, if you want to start writing more because you have unique ideas about what's happening in your industry, you can go to my Notion page, which I don't even have easily accessible. I think it's bitly.com slash Carmel Stories. You know, my lack of traditional marketing background is getting me right now. And I'm also doing some content consultancy in terms of strategy from a high level of really catering your content strategy for your company and your product and your user base because that's what Figma did. And it meant that we did not follow the traditional

SEO growth marketing playbook and it worked out. Yeah. Well, I thank you privately for this, but I do want to thank you publicly for the amount of help that you gave to always day one. Definitely a different book after you come through it. So I appreciate that and great. Getting a chance to speak with you today about the Figma story. I hadn't heard it in this amount of detail, I've gotten bits and pieces, got to visit the office a bunch back in the day. Oh, yeah, you'd come over for beers. I forgot. That was a good time. And Dylan would usually still be there.

And I'd be like, Dylan, this is my friend Alex. He's a journalist. They don't care about us. It's actually what happened. Oops, that was a big mistake. But anyway, it's really cool to hear the story. And congratulations to you for being so early in a company that succeeded as well as it did. So anyway, congrats. Yeah.

This is fun. Awesome. Well, thank you, Carmel, so much for joining. It's been another great episode of Big Technology Podcast. We have a real amazing slate of shows coming up for you. We have some CEOs. Well, I was just saying, we might be having Tristan Harrison in the next couple weeks to talk a little bit about the social media and the midterm elections, which I think will be really fun. I'm definitely going to do another politics episode sometime soon.

So brace yourself for that. But I do think it's important to discuss. And then, yeah, a handful of CEOs coming up in November. I think you're going to love it. If you're still here with us and you haven't signed off yet and you haven't rated big technology podcast, five stars in either Apple Podcasts or Spotify would really go a long way to helping us reach more amazing listeners like you.

So I would love it if you gave us a rating. I want to say thank you to Nick Guatni, are terrific and always dependable, always excellent audio editor thank you Nate thank you to LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network and thanks again to all of you listeners I appreciate you coming back here week after week and joining us every Wednesday for conversations with tech insiders and outside agitators sometimes people right in the middle like Carmel love having you here all right that will do it for us here and we will see you next time on big technology podcast Thank you.