TBPN Live - Weekly Recap: Figma’s IPO, Ramp Reaches $22.5B, Gwyneth Paltrow Saves Astronomer, Top AI Researchers Ranked

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

(00:00) - Intro (00:03) - Gwyneth Paltrow Saves Astronomer (19:25) - The Metis List of Top AI Researchers (24:16) - Eric Glyman (Ramp) (50:31) - Figma IPO (01:03:58) - Andrew Reed (Sequoia Capital) (01:18:43) - Timeline Reactions To Figma IPO TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.com/tbpnFin - https://fin.ai/tbpnGraphite - https://graphite.devRestream - https://restream.ioFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TBPN. Astronomer is back. Astronomer had ramp on the website. Apparently ramp's a happy customer. Ramp never lost faith. Never lost faith, yeah. So, Astronomer, if you weren't following, if you were living under a rock,

Apache Airflow as a service, managed enterprise SaaS platform on top of Apache Airflow for data analytics, streaming data, that type of stuff. And they had an absolutely chaotic week last week with their CEO being caught at a Coldplay concert. Was that last week or the week before? I think it was the week before.

The week before, had to have been. But the CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. Chris Martin called him out on stage and said, oh, those people look like they're having an affair. Did he actually say that live? He did say that on the video. No way.

So they're panning around to the different kiss cams or different just cameras and they spot the CEO of Astronomer hugging the head of HR. Can't even hug your employees anymore apparently. Can't even give your chief people officer a hug in this country anymore. And once they see themselves on the screen at the show, they recoil in horror and turn around and the other person in HR who's sitting next to them is like, oh my god, what's going

on? Well, that's what I didn't understand. Was that actually? Apparently. People went and dug it up and found out that she works there too. I thought that was people just saying, hey, this person looks like this person. Oh, I don't know. I thought that was people just saying hey this person looks like this person It seems wild that the HR department was hitting the concert with the CEO It was like an open secret. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, it's possible. It did not it was not good for astronomer

yep, we were discussing this Lulu was saying the CEO's got to go because he's a hired gun not a founder and It's it just displays very bad character and it reflects poorly on the company. We were kind of going back and forth on this as the, like about the idea of like, okay, yeah, like the CEO did something bad in his personal life, but like, do you really want to find an alternative to your managed Apache Airflow service? Like it's kind of a hassle to rip that out

if you're happy with the product. And to be clear, we said that the company would be fine. They did need a new CEO immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete, stepped up within days. Pete DeJoy. Oh, wait, so the founder's back and the CEO is back? Let's go.

That's a real bull case for Astronomer. For the Ashton Hall sound effect, I want to hear some good news. Let's go. Astronomer is now founder mode, everybody. Astronomer is totally in founder mode. Soundboard for the Ashton Hall sound effect. I want to hear some good news Astronomer is now founder mode everybody Astronomer is totally in founder mode. They were already delivering the world's data. Yes, and now they're in founder mode They're in founder mode. I think they're uncertain. I'm excited another billion dollars for being capital. Let's hear it for being capital So and actually I I didn't know that. Anyway, so. And actually, I emailed briefly with Pete DeJoy. And he said he's a fan of the show.

Amazing. We're hoping to get him on. We don't want to actually talk about any of this stuff. No, I'm over it. I want to talk about Apache Airflow. I'm so into Apache Airflow now. I'm so ready. But anyways, so late Friday night, the astronomer watched the video.

Let's pull it up. They didn't want us to react to this on stream, so they put it up after we logged off. Let's pull up the video. I wanna watch the full thing. Thank you for your interest in astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis

to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days. And they wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI pipelines at scale. We've been thrilled so many people have a new found interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we've received.

Yes, there is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September. We will now be returning to what we do best. And you know that Gwenneth is Chris Martin's ex-wife. Yes. Thank you for your interest in this topic. Which makes the entire thing. It's very funny. It's when it is Chris Martin's ex-wife. Yes. Thank you for your interest in this entire thing. It's very funny.

It's not really like Chris, it's not like getting back at Chris Martin in any sort of weird way. It's just funny that it's like another voice from that universe. Yeah, so they remain close friends and co-parents. Okay, okay, okay. So in so many ways, like she's like the best spokesperson for this because

anyways, you know How quickly they shot that, you know, they had to like yeah probably like a conference room near her office or like her house Or something. Yeah, it's a perfect response. We don't need one minute astronomer there at all six lines It's really ties into the story. It made sense. It wasn't just some random celebrity. It had some funny tie in. And I think it was incredibly well done. Lulu broke it down. She said, laughing at themselves was the right move

because humor does four crucial things. Connects with a new audience. Even for people who don't care about a pasty airflow, being in on the joke together forms a connection with the astronomer. Diffuse tension by joining the ridicule They're no longer its subject or its object get closure. They said it out loud. The joke is tapped Everyone can move on signal a fresh start the CEO and HR lady are gone

It's a new management team and making light of this shows there. They've consciously uncoupled from the past Great breakdown. Very well written, Lulu. The third point is so funny because there's a little bit about like nothing will kill a joke, like independent of all the crazy astronomer, Chris Martin Coldplay thing, there's nothing that will kill a joke faster

than a series D enterprise SaaS company making the joke. And so if they're making, if they're jumping in on the joke, it's like, well, we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop. And so if they're making, if they're jumping in on the joke, it's like, well, we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop. And so we jumped in, we're playing along, and we got the last, literally the last laugh. Like, if anyone tried to post something about

astronomer CEO Coldplay, all of that, like they would immediately be, everyone would be like, yeah, we've moved on. The real question is, is the IPO windows open should they go public? Come on, meme stock. We've moved on the real question is is the IPO windows open should they go public? Come mean stock and actually have Gwyneth step in like kind of like chairman. Yeah, you know really expand They need a treasury they do but they need something that that that speaks to the the the history of the company They need to buy some some funny funny asset to put on the balance sheet. I was thinking about, um, they, we've moved on from Bitcoin treasuries to like the further

out risk curve ones. Well, there's all the Ethereum treasuries, GameStop treasury, which is hilarious. I think the next generation is just straight up lottery ticket treasury. Just scratchers. I thought you were going to say like they should put some like match group on the balance sheet. They should. That would be good. That would be more like tied to this. And I think that makes sense for astronomer. Get a bunch of match group. Get a bunch of match group stock on your balance sheet. By the way, we're...

Or like Eventbrite maybe. Or who runs like the Coldplay concerts, it's like, didn't Taylor Swift sue them? Ticketmaster, get some Ticketmaster stock on the balance sheet, who knows? That would tie into the lore a little bit. It really is just a way to signal the values of the company. Exactly, exactly. And also some potential upsides. What was that company, there was that biotherapies company

that was saying, we're fighting financial fraud by buying GameStop stock or something like that, or financial inefficiencies. But yeah, get some scratchers. Market manipulation. Get some scratchers on the balance sheet for sure. Get some lottery tickets. Everyone's like, yeah, they have $50,000 in lottery tickets,

but if it hits, this could be $500 million on the balance sheet. Yeah, it is such a, I think a year from now we'll look back and say like they found a way to actually turn this into a win, right? Oh yeah, totally. Now some people, if you know, this is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen

in this decade. For sure. But I think if you now have a million, millions of people that like have think your company is kind of like cool and funny and they're aware of it they're aware of it and then it would have cost them it would have cost them I'm sure this Gwyneth video cost millions of dollars I think it probably would have cost them to try to to try to build that type of brand recognition

otherwise yeah like just just, would have cost multiples of that. I only have one note on the video. I mean, Autism Capital here says, you have to give credit where credit is due. This is 10 out of 10 PR recovery. I think it loses one point because it was hard posted and not restreamed. One live stream, 30 destinations,

multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. They should have restreamed it. Anyway, fantastic comeback. Lulu says, next move is for an astronomer competitor to hire Chris Martin to do a video on how their product is the best at helping you gain visibility in any environment and keep your private networking secure.

And somebody in the comments says, the chain is gonna end with Brad Pitt. I don't even know who astronomers competitors are. Don't know who their competitors are, but I don't know, maybe they should. That's why this is a win for astronomer. It's a huge win for astronomer. And yeah, I mean, also interesting

because this kind of plays into what we were talking about with Paul from BrowserBase, this idea of like, the Apache Airflow's open source, you would expect that managed airflow would be something that's, you know, totally in AWS's wheelhouse. And yet they were able to scale to a series D company, 300 employees, like clearly doing well. And now they have this like breakout moment

and they still are probably facing fierce competition from the hyperscalers, but from the from the big cloud platforms but they just don't. So the timing of this is so insane. Bane led the series D it was announced on May 1st. Let's go. So love it. Just very recently here. I mean they've been putting up some incredible numbers. Let's get me Romney on the show have him talk about it. Last last fiscal year astronomers saw 150% year over year ARR growth, world-class 130% net revenue retention, and 90% product utilization with customers. So I mean I think they're gonna have a massive end to the year.

Speaking of high NPS products, let's tell you about Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. And we will be in the great city of New York this week for the Figma IPO. We will be. We will be live from NYSEE,

the New York Stock Exchange, on Thursday. That's what the cool kids call it, NYSEE. NYSEE. I always just call it NYSEE, or like the New York Stock Exchange. But when you're saying it every other word, because you're in that world, because you're doing it to yourself,

when you're big in that world, you don't have time. When you're taking companies public like every other week. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You gotta use the slang. Yeah, you gotta. With the cool kids use.

Okay, bull or bear case for Figma. I go to Figma Make, and I tell it, build me a collaborative design tool Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes Recursive the snake eating its tail you use figma to make figma then you don't need figma anymore. Is that bear case? What's going on here? Well, I think you've been powerful. You're basically still paying figma to host. Okay. Okay So they get you to host it. Okay, that's how they get you locked in. You're paying.

That's how they get you locked in. You're paying one way or another. Yeah, I like that though. It's an existential risk for all these platforms that allow you to build software vibe code. Well, that's why every SaaS company- First thing I want to vibe code is a vibe coding platform. Well, yeah, that's why every SaaS company

has to have a vibe coding product now. Yes, so you can vibe code the product itself. Yeah. Yes, the tautological vibe code. No, that is,. Yes, so you can vibe code the product itself. Yeah. Yes, the tautological vibe code. No, that is, I mean, so the question, people have been saying like, okay, at some point in the future, you'll be able to one shot products.

Yep. And I would say I have a really strong conviction that in the next few years, you'll be able to one shot a design tool. Yep. you'll be able to one-shot a design tool. Will you be able to one-shot a design tool that works in the enterprise, that work as like, when you think like, Figma has been like shipping features every single day

for a decade now. And even if you knew exactly which features mattered and how they all work together, it would be very difficult to create a one-to-one clone. And then also there's the network of, if you hire a designer and you're like, hey, I need you to use my vibe code in Figma knockoff that I've got in Figma.

Can you just pay the 20 bucks a month? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and then, yeah, so the ecosystem's very important. And there's a whole app ecosystem. Exactly. It makes me, it definitely makes me more bullish on companies that have these developer app ecosystems. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Shopify is the same way. Maybe you could one shot an e-commerce storefront product, but can you, are you then gonna one shot the downstream? I mean, as soon as LLMs were writing code and we were talking about like AGI takeoff and super intelligence, I had this like running thought about, okay, so at a certain point, you can go to an LLM or a vibe coding platform

and say like, build me an e-commerce website and it will just say like, okay, setting up Shopify. But in the far, far future, it could just say, okay, applying for a banking license, applying for a money transfer license. I'm going to rebuild Stripe, I'm going to rebuild Shopify, I'm going to rebuild a database from first principles,

I'm going to use just raw C++. Actually, you're just gonna make a data center. I'm gonna build a data center. If I wanna build an internet company, I should have at least one data center. And it all just does that in one prompt. Because one prompt fires off, I mean how many man hours have gone into building Stripe

or building any of these companies? It's like tens of thousands of employees for most of them, for decades you add all that together. But if the LLM can do that, if the AI system can do that in the data center in just a few minutes, in hyper compression, who knows, maybe. Logan Bartlett has another take on the astronomer video. He says, the astronomer video is great on its own,

but I'm even more impressed that the leadership team and the board were able to come to consensus to make this investment and take this risk. Absent they've had for two years for the last two years. I can't imagine everyone was on board with this initially. So major kudos to everyone getting there eventually and taking this chance. This bodes well for their future. IMO. And I agree. Uh, like even with going to the Paltrow, it feels so funny, but like there's this idea of like, let's,

let's put out not a standard legal statement is, it feels risky and it's so easy for someone to step up and say, Hey, like let's not take this risk. It's not worth it. Well they put out the quick statement that Pete was stepping back into the, yeah, they had put out a few statements, but clearly, um, something, something was, was clicking. What should Andy Byer and the CEO, the CEO having the affair which I mean that's the best part about this video is that it doesn't take shots at him yeah it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't punch down it doesn't make it like oh it

doesn't drag that in it doesn't make it more complicated and a lot of times when when CEOs do get pushed out there's like lawsuits about comp and was it a fair to release people? And so there's like all these things that can come back. Like if you are, especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, you should be, you should probably not be talking about that C that's CEO. Because if you come out and say they were not good, and that's why I had to step back in,

then that could hurt their career prospects, and then they could sue you for defamation or something like that. So there's a lot of risk to anything around that, all the corporate comms, like it is, like the lawyers are like annoying, but like they do make a good point, that like there is financial impact if you get it wrong.

So very, very good. And then Stays SA says, I think we're going to find out that Chris Martin felt bad asked Gwyneth Paltrow to help out and they gave astronomer an offer to do damage control. My guess is that this is entertainment industry magic happening, not data tech magic. Hmm. Logan says Chris Martin wants to want CEOs who are having affairs

to feel welcome. his romantic concerts. He's like, this could be really bad for business. This could be bad for ticket sales. I have to go into damage control. I don't think Chris Martin's behind this. This is a ridiculous theory that just stay say, stay sassy or whatever. Logan says totally possible.

No, I do. I think there could be something here. I mean. I don't think so. I don't know. Why, he feels bad that this just happened at his show. I don't think so. I don't know. He feels bad that this just happened at his show. Chris Martin has the data. He might be like 10% of people at my concerts are having affairs.

You think he's storing it in Apache Airflow? Or yeah, maybe he just really cares about it. All of his ticket sales are going through Apache Airflow and he's monitoring it using Astronomer. He's just like, no, my bags, I love this company. He's actually accidentally an investor as well, through some fun. Maybe he's just like, no, my bags, I love this company. He's like, actually, accidentally an investor as well, through some fun. Maybe he's a Bain Capital LP, who knows?

He might be at that level. He might be heavily anchor GP. Anchor LP in Bain and Index. And to close out, Lulu said, for everyone asking me, this wasn't me, I do not work with Astronomer, but I think it was very well done who knows to their team and it says a lot about Lulu's brand that whenever good PR happens people like Lulu's has to be behind this it's it can only be her it can't possibly it did it

did it did scream I didn't I didn't I didn't ask her because I didn't want to know because like I just like you know the mystery I like the mystery of it. I feel like if I knew I should probably say something Anyway, let's shift gears. Let's tell you about Vanta automate compliance manage risk improve trust continuously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Cheers to Vanta. In the other side of PR statements, the T-App hack is an absolute disaster.

This is an app. And their statement was a disaster. Their statement was a disaster. It does not seem that they're handling it well. Somebody just informed me. Please. A friend of the show. Yes.

That it was Ryan Reynolds' agency that pulled it off no way that makes total sense yeah Ryan Reynolds the bridge between tech Hollywood Hollywood tech oh he's master master was crap and I feel like he's done a number of those like solo director was actually reported so there's an article cool Ryan Reynolds maximum effort ad agency turned astronomers viral moment into marketing gold. Wow. The production company was involved with the latest Astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow.

The ad is being hailed as a master class in crisis PR. I agree. Astronomer, Fortune is saying, Astronomer got the last laugh. They did, they really did. Releasing it late on a Friday too is great. Shutting down the work week. Well, you don't want AWS to trade down too heavily They did they really did Releasing it late on a Friday too is great Shutting down the workweek. Well, you don't want AWS to trade down too heavily on the news You know if you release that during market hours could be turmoil could trigger an entire market sell-off and last week

We had five back-to-back all-time highs in the s&p 500 That's why we're wearing white suits and we're wearing white suits because we have peace with Europe peace with Europe We created a list of top AI researchers. It's called the MEDIS list and it's available. It's live now at MEDISlist.com. These are the world's top AI researchers. We're of course experts in AI and AI researchers. So we are fully qualified to curate this list,

but we did have some help from friends and we pulled some data we looked at it was interesting this tops many of the people that we asked to do kind of like an elo style ranking did not want to be named because nobody wants to be picking favorites yeah on the inside but I think we put together a great list it's honestly some of the most impressive there's people in the top 10 with no Dwarkech appearances. I don't know how that happens. It's crazy. How do they do it? You got to get on Dwarkech. Yeah, we tried to have some fun with this. We pulled some Google citations, some Google research citations, looked at some of the previous companies.

This was of course based on the list, which apparently has been going around Silicon Valley. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg has been, you know, using this to recruit top AI researchers. We've been following the trade war as Jordy put it earlier. We should have put a, we should have put a, a buy it now price on here for, for Zuck. So you could just add to cart. Add to cart. Yeah. Just, just create the super intelligence team directly on metaslist.com. Maybe that's how we monetize this thing. Yeah, it was good to see Alan Turing make the list.

Fantastic, yeah, underrated. George Buhl, not doing so well, inventor of Boolean logic, but he did make the list. But I think he's sitting in the 80s, not doing too well. Tyler, tell us more about the list. What do you think stands out? What'd you learn from the process? What was your methodology?

How'd you build this thing? Yes, this is a lot of fun. I scraped most of Google Scholar, like the top 5,000 people maybe, and then with some friends from the big labs, I kind of narrowed it down. You can see a lot of the papers, they've written the interest, stuff like that.

I think another gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's, let's see, he's ranked number six. He's at six gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's let's see. He's ranked number six. He's at six. Yeah. People love touring. I mean, we passed his test and how long did his test stand? What? 60, 80 years? Not bad. Yeah. Something like that. That's longer than most benchmarks in evals. Alan Turing versus Gold Post. Who wins?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, what were you about to say? Yeah. I mean, it's the longest enduring benchmark. I think for sure 80 years Yeah, but who knows our KGI v3 might be around for 80 years. We might be hearing I beat in 20 in 2034 or something wait now 2120 I guess would be like the the Alan Turing test benchmark We got John Shulman, who else? Juergen Schmidhuber's on here. Jeff Dean, one of the greatest to ever do it over at Google.

He's been at Google for a long time. Still, yes, a Dwar Kesh appearance. Let's go. That's good. Built MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow. Jan Lacoon's in here. You got all the different countries. Really wide representation.

Canada, UK, Australia, Russia, China. There's all here, you got all the different countries, really wide representation, Canada, UK, Australia, Russia, China, there's all sorts of people from all over coming together, a couple people without photos have been able to stay anonymous, but most people, we got their photo, Shalto Douglas, good to see him on here, so this should be fun. Well, I'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, Shalto ranked 56, but three Dwarke's appearances. There we go, I mean, how'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, Dwark, Shalto ranked 56,

but three Dwark Hesh appearances. There we go. I mean, how are you, were you waiting, were you waiting podcast appearances properly, Tyler? Yeah, he should be at the top. He wants to get four. Putting up numbers like that for sure. Yeah. For sure.

Yeah, he's gonna be coming for Elia's spot. Yeah, so this is a lot of fun. There's an email signup. You can drop your email at the top to learn about the next drop, whatever we send out. Whenever we go live with stuff, we will let you know first. And we're getting big into email soon, by the way. Stay tuned for that.

Very excited about that. And yeah, hopefully this speeds up our trading card generation, because you'll just be able to screenshot this and say this person's just got traded because it's moving fast and furious and we can't spend that much time hand crafting each of those trade deal trading card images.

We might be able to rip them. Zuck moves too quickly. Indeed, indeed. There's a lot of stuff going on. Well, interesting, related to Zuck, did you know that one of the kids at the IMO that was competing against OpenAI and DeepMind was named Alexander Wang?

Wow. Great nominative determinism. Yeah. Future Alex Wang. Bright future. And speaking of IMOs. Yeah, people are calling him the Alexander Wang of math. The next Alexander Wang. The next Alexander Wang. Next in line to the Alexander Wang of math. The next Alexander Wang. The next Alexander Wang.

Next in line to the Alex Wang drone. He does have an E, it's not A-L-X-E-N-D-E. It's D-E-R instead of D-R. So slightly different, but still, Alex Wang nonetheless. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Our humble New York temple of technology. Yeah, give us the update.

What's the news today? Break it down for us. Great jacket, by the way. You look fantastic. Got little touches of yellow in there. It's not quite yellow enough for my taste, but there is a little bit of yellow. By the way, our tailor designed these to celebrate and really symbolize saving time and money. Yes. So I think they did the job. I think they did the job. I'm overwhelmed. I'm just a bit excited. We'll get you one too. We'll definitely get you one. We gotta do this, guys. We gotta go man on the street in like Times Square.

What do you do for a living? What business do you run? Do you wanna save time and money? Let's get you on Ramp right now. We'll introduce you to the CEO. Ramp.com. That's phenomenal. Yeah, but break it down for us.

What happened today? Yeah, well first, I mean, we might need a bigger gong. I know. We're all here. We own all I know. You have no idea we're going to the ends of America to get an American-made gong and we're looking for something that will actually be floor-to-ceiling you know it'll be you know something like 20 by 20 so working on that I look forward to hitting it for the next one. the series E3. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break it down. This is phenomenal.

Guys, thanks for being here. Here in New York, the capital of capital. Yes, it is. It really is. Technology here at TVPN. We raised $500 million at a $22 and 1.5 billion valuation. There we go. There we go.

That's a nice ring to it. I'm really looking forward to it. And I'm. Nice ring to it. I'm really appreciate and I'm losing track, but it seems like ramp has not been able to get a fundraise public without it leaking five days previously to the press. But this is official.

I'm glad to make it official here. It is official. It's the right valuation. And look, I early on in my career, I got this advice that the biggest battle a startup faces is people not giving a shit, people not caring. And so, you know what, we're happy that people care,

even if things come out a couple days before. But we feel super lucky. And so that's the big news of the day. But I think so much of what we focused on today, especially in the raise, is what we're gonna do with the capital. Between the last Rays, which we were proud to hit the gong for here 45 days ago, six weeks ago, some of it actually came from the product.

We launched our first AI agent for controllers, and the data was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Interesting. So that catalyzed this? 100%. Yeah. That's my big question. Why E2? Why not F?

And then also, it feels like you're like the king of a bunch of fundraisers in a short amount of time. There's clearly some benefits to that. But why not just one massive? I got to give some credit to the business, John. I mean, Eric's a great CEO. But the business is really, you know. Well, we haven't talked about this before. We'll share it. Right now, July is pacing.

We're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume in July than June. It's been one month. Like the business is growing extraordinarily quickly. What's that meme with the guy on Hot Ones? No, no, no, guys. Don't talk. We need to have Celsius. But no, no, no. That's insane. The business itself is growing.

I remember, I'm sure back in 2020, you'd be happily sending investors, like, we grew 20% month over month, but on like, whatever, 1% of the scale. So really wild. Yeah. I guess the bigger meta question is just like, there is a world where you stack a bunch of these wins into the mega deck and then just do one massive fundraise every 18 months. There's this meme of like fundraising is a distraction. The CEO should be out there working with customers and proving the product.

Obviously you're doing that. But how do you, how do you do these back to back fundraisers without them being distracting? I know you have a big team now. But like, what goes into the decision to do like it, I don't know if they're even smaller, but just like more frequent fundraisers. Because that feels like something that's unique to your company.

Yeah, for sure. So one, it's sort of a funny thing, but I actually didn't understand this before in the startup world. What is a series A or a B or an E2 really? Somebody who did a $55 million seed round. Yeah. And then you'll talk to some people.

We pressed them. We were like, is this for marketing? Yeah. You're still going to get the expectation will be that you perform at the Series B level based on this. If I walk around that company, it's going to feel like a Series B company. I almost think calling things by letters is totally silly.

All it actually meant was we had a set of documents that we use. Whenever financing happens, there's hundreds of pages of documents that go back and forth between company and investor. Calling it an E2 just meant that we used the exact same documents. Save time and money. There we go.

Save money on lawyer. No, it was really just that. So look, it was very efficient to get the financing done. And I also believe a lot in this concept of marking to market. Totally. In real time, what are companies ultimately worth. And when you look at the fundraise from about a month and a half ago, I think it was when it was announced done earlier, we raised I think in exchange for about $200 million,

approximately 1% more shares came onto the cap table. So it was a very small amount of dilution. With this raise of 500 million at 22 and a half, it's like two-ish percent. See, these are not that dilutive. But it's reflective. It's not completely restructuring the company, but it's giving you a more modern mark.

Adding to the war chest. Adding to the war chest, and I think it's a good thing, because one, it allows people to invest at the right point in time, but two, because you're not raising far ahead of where metrics are, it means that the company's not that distracted. You know, for the actual organization, like we've just been obsessed with going.

And- You're not in a position where everyone's like, oh, like at this valuation, like Ramp doesn't just need an act two, but they need an act three, four, and five. They gotta create super intelligence and all this crazy stuff because it's based on the actual progress of the company.

100% right. Makes sense. I wanna talk about the product, I wanna talk about the AI agent thing. The interesting, my experience with RAMP was that it was in many ways an AI agent before AI agents was a buzzword, and I know that obviously when you scan a receipt, it goes through an OCR process,

and the data, the text is extracted from the image, and then I would assume that you were an early adopter of LLMs to help clean that up, and that was, in many ways, a more, like a super magical AI agent experience, but I'm not prompting it. It's just something that's happening in the background. It's invisible.

It's invisible. And you're using some deterministic code, some probabilistic code, some older machine learning algorithms for OCR, some newer LLMs to clean up the data and tag things and say, this is a restaurant, that's a flight, and do all the magic that helps categorize expenses.

The question is, it feels like a big shift to put the agent in the hands of the user. And so you said that you're seeing incredible adoption. What are people actually using for? What's the feedback? And I mean, what else are the learnings of where that goes? Do people want that, or do people ultimately want

to be able to prompt a few times and then have things baked into the core, behind the scenes workflows? Yeah, so I feel like, so let's talk a little bit about what are AI assistants? What are AI agents? What's the distinction? Because I actually think people are pretty sloppy with the two. And so I feel like-

To be clear, if you want to raise money right now, you just build SaaS and call it an agent. Boom. But let's talk. We have a lot of people who are building, who are listening to this podcast. So I think first for assistants or co-pilots, the idea is a person prompts. the co-pilot will review

it, will make a recommendation, but then ultimately it's on the human to go do the work. I get a recommendation, I input its back and forth. This is maybe similar to an experience that you might have on a chat GPT or that kind of a thing. An agent is a bit different. What you do is you give it instructions and access to tools and you say under certain conditions, if you see an outcome that I've instructed you to drive, just go do it, right?

And so- Forever, essentially. Forever, and you know, I'm gonna modify things from time to time. But it's a little bit more similar to like, let's say you hire an intern or a new hire, you teach them how to do the job, you watch a bunch of times.

They do that on an ongoing basis. And then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the distinction. And one of the,, you watch a bunch of times. And then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the distinction. And one of the, if you think about what we're actually optimizing for, one of the core metrics is we look at what was the amount of work that a Ramp customer was able to do in a single,

let's say in an hour or in a minute. And so as we look over the years, that's gone up a lot. And if you joined in 2023, mathematically, we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the metric is, as you did just two years ago, for every minute you're spending on the site.

So it's all to say, like, every minute is counting for three times more. I think that ratio should be 30 times more. And if you look at what happened, so we launched the, we made this announcement about three, four weeks ago for this first AI agent and we had early adopters, Notion, Webflow, Quora. The stats just absolutely shocked us when we looked at this. Functionally, these companies were able to get 15 times more work done, transactions categorized, but the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day, like they know the expense policy

better than any manager at the company and so it was 99% accurate. It got a lot more tasks done and suddenly, like for many people who've worked at large companies, you spend an hour just reviewing expenses, and you're like, why am I spending an hour reviewing someone's Uber or their purchase? And that's just gone. And you're focusing on actually the interesting exceptions. And so where I think this adds up to is, for a lot of years, people had to be forced to learn how does software work work and how do I think

like software, how do I learn to use Salesforce, how do I learn to use Google, how do I learn to use Excel. Now we're teaching these software programs to think like people and that means you can teach software functionally the same way you would an intern to go and figure out what expenses are in and out of policy and that very avid software that doesn't take breaks, doesn't take holidays, that is obsessed over every deal that your expense policy can catch when your policy is incomplete.

That's online if you need to talk to it at you're on a work trip and you need to, yeah, or yeah, therapy. But I was gonna say, like, you don't, if you can avoid messaging somebody on the weekend to ask if something's in or out of policy, it's like, it benefits everybody.

Yeah. That's exactly right. And I think you're bringing up another point of a lot of work is sort of if this and that. You want to buy a new piece of software and that vendor sends you a quote, then procurement negotiates it. Once procurement negotiates it, then legal takes a look at it. Once legal says it's fine, then finance says is there an invoice

and we go and pay it out, and then it goes into accounting. But if you have lots of digital agents functionally all the time online and responsive, these things can occur simultaneously. And so it means actually instead of waiting days to go and onboard a new vendor, it can be done in minutes.

And so it just means it's much easier to do work. And I think the big picture of like, why are we here at all? It's actually just to save time and money to make it easier for more companies to operate. And that's what this stuff adds up to. It's really nice when you don't have to update your mission statement. I know. As new technology. I mean, this is we've talked about, you know, Google's original mission statement as new technology. I mean, we've talked about Google's original mission

statement, which is loosely organize and make the world's information valuable. And it's like, OK, well, generative AI does that very efficiently. Agentic workflows applied to finance, save people time and money. It's the same mission. I want to take a post about a post from Keith Raboi.

He said five out of six board meetings he had in the last couple months were about how to design a company's organization for AI. I'm interested in, and we've been debating this in the context of meta super intelligence, is artificial intelligence an app like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or is it like their finance team,

like their infrastructure team, like their database team that sits across all of the apps as like a service layer? And I'm interested to know, like you have a product now, and I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product, and that product has AI in the name. But then I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product and that product has AI in the name. But then I imagine that every single person from designers

to engineers to the ops people are using artificial intelligence in their day to day. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a new cross-functional team develop or how you're thinking through that trade-off of horizontal versus vertical, maybe both teams in just terms of running a high-performance organization? I love his post. I think it's actually, I'll put it this way, I don't think most people have really come

to terms with the reality that computers can see like see and hear and like think now. Yeah, it's crazy. It's so different and like if you're like just going and repeating the same organizational structure that like was in place when anything were possible like it's a little bit of like are you are you are you awake? Like this actually is the right question and one I think people should be spending a lot more time in, you know, in earnest. We need more business. We need some new business, you know, management textbooks.

It's true. Yeah, for sure. It's a joke, but there's no like enduring. Yeah. So if you don't, if you have a whole piece of your org chart that doesn't have any AI on it, like you're going to ship that in the product and then people are going to be like, wait, this part of this piece of the product feels very manual and like web one point out almost. Yeah, I mean, one thing that happened yesterday

was Zuck basically saying you can now use AI in your coding interviews, which sounds insane. Like, wouldn't you wanna still hire for people that might just naturally be good at engineering and then get better? But he's basically making the statement of, no, we're so committed to this new paradigm that, yeah, you should use every tool you have available to do the best possible work.

And I think it's totally right, and I'll admit something, even for people who are entering soon, there are some job functions at Ramp where it is actually not possible to pass an interview or coding interview without using an LLM. And that's intentional. It's actually intentional to figure out,

are you curious about that? Are you using these tools or not? It's not a question of IQ. I think there's brilliant people who don't need an LLM to think, but I think that the capabilities of being able to access an extraordinary amount of compute as well as specialized knowledge, why wouldn't you? And I-

Yeah, it's like just because Scott Wu could do a problem in his head doesn't mean he shouldn't use calculator. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's funny, one of the old coding challenges was this thing called FizzBuzz, where you try and write out numbers from zero to one, and if it's odd or if it's divisible by three,

you write Fizz, and if it's divisible by seven, you write fizz, and if it's divisible by seven, you write buzz, and then if it's divisible by both, you write fizz buzz. And it's like a very basic coding challenge, but it always assumes that you have access to Python. And it's not saying, okay, you have to go and fab your own semiconductor to do it. And so it makes sense that we are in the age of LLMs, that's gonna be a tool that we expect you to pull off.

Don't give Eric ideas, the Kareem might start requiring the engineering team. You're going to have to be able to set up your own semi-fab in order to do it. Write it out in binary with a pen and paper. Engineering with your own silicon. One interesting thing, we've talked a lot about this like move 37 concept. Lisa Doll, the Google DeepMind challenge, they beat Lisa Doll.

And in move 37, it was like this moment of true inspiration where AlphaGo put a piece on the board that was so unexpected Lisa Dahl stood up went outside smoked a cigarette and was like had his mind blown right and we've had moments like that maybe the studio Ghibli moment is this like we've had passing the touring test but there's also been plenty of areas that feel more intractable in terms of artificial intelligence and it feels like if you are Like it with the latest IMO problem six with this combinatorics problem that I don't understand But neither does open AI or Google apparently so you know we're basically the same but My but my question is like is like

With the AI agents product are there are there things that you see CFOs, modern CFOs do? Like what is the humanities last exam, the intractable problem, the most elegant, beautiful thing that a CFO can do that feels like, oh, this is gonna be something that's happening and requires like the human touch for a very, very long time. I think my immediate thought, it's to give you some time to think,

is it feels like AI today is really good at doing the work that a management consultant could do. So you can tell them, I run this type of business, make me a marketing planner, come up with five ideas for marketing strategies in Q4. And it will create a great report. It'll look great, it'll have some, maybe some decent ideas. And yet it still feels like to do truly exceptional work.

Like we, like Monday, like the three of us spent like a couple hours talking about some campaign and like debating it and all these different points. And it's like, we could have had AI in the mix there but you could imagine to be tossing in ideas that were kind of maybe random and maybe something helpful, but it was still like you just like, people needed to just like sit there

and just like hash it out. And it feels like that's like, you know, do the work to like do analysis, create reports, you know, when it comes to like actual knowledge work. But anyways, I don't know what your thought is. I love this line of questioning and I think it's gonna get super interesting, especially as AI is going from a primarily academic tool and also in some ways I feel like it's

it's jumped into software engineering in part because you know software engineers know what it is to code and you know they're working with AI and so they have good taste and there's these great feedback loops and so it's happening there sooner but it's starting to make it into general business logic, finance, everything. I think a good place to start if you just want to decompose the problem is like what is the job of finance actually? What is it? And I think if you were to just really simplifying it down it's in my in my view, some subset of, you're gonna define a set of rules that govern

who's able to spend what, under what circumstances, what are the controls you have in place. Once activity has occurred, you've spent money, things are coming in, how do you record that activity accurately? Close your books. And then, based on what occurred, how do you goal seek to more profitability, more growth, more cash flow, whatever thing you're going

to go try to go do. It's about it. And if you really kind of simplify it, it's just a set of rules and algorithms. These systems, one, they're incredibly complicated to do each of those things. And so I actually think like brilliant people have over the last 50, 100 years been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases, like tabulators just calculating things or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over or matching the receipts and doing like very low level tasks

and only doing a little bit, you know, after you've finally looked at it. A great example is like when any like TV show about business, it's like, you look at like the office, all of this, was any real work done? Like you didn't, you don't really, do you remember a time when they were maybe once or twice, they called a customer or they did a customer meeting,

but outside of that, it's like thousands of hours of just like they're doing business, but they're not like, are they really getting anything done? And so I think the point you're making is like, how much of the work that we do should be the work that we're doing? And how much is- You nailed it.

Like I think so much of work is very mechanical and it's, you know, we want finance to be forward-thinking and strategic but the reality of a lot of finance is looking backward. I think that's yeah I think that the strategic thing is really key like like Tyler Cowen would say that like relationships are very Lindy and gonna stick around for a long time trust building that type of stuff but Ben Thompson dumped some sort of you know 10q into chat GPT and said, make me a Ben Thompson style article.

And it did some of it, but it didn't have the actual strategic insights in the storytelling that can actually marshal the proper resources. And I feel like that's in many ways the job of CFO. It's risk taking, it's deciding the right strategy for the situation and it seems like the frontier models are not quite there yet. You nailed it. And I think that when I think about the next set of years, with the fundraisers we tried

to lay out, we're seeing glimmers of this whole industry is going to get rewritten. What do we think the industry looks like over the next three to five years? What does the org look like? And we laid that out in the post. But I think the biggest transformation is really, really, I think most of the finance function today, unfortunately, is very backward looking.

But I think as automation, agentic workflows are coming to the forefront, platforms like Ramp, actually more people can be looking forward, can be spending time, you know, on like for Ben Thompson, like what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better? And when I think of like what is that last exam ultimately for a finance organization is, you know,

I think there are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies I think about are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies that I think about is Amazon. In its early days, so they were very early and they would send email follow-ups to customers, you just bought this. And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write,

like if you've seen like the Trader Joe's newsletter where someone writes like these poetic things about the new ingredients and cool stuff, come try this and whatever. Amazon did that in the 90s. There was an editorial team talking about the great new products that were coming online on amazon.com and then there was this personalization team. It's like, I don't know, P12N or whatever it is. And they said, we're going to A-B test it. This personalization team, you're going to get 10% of the send, and your job is to just go

and try to find these weird connections, these move 37s of like, you just bought this, you may be interested in this product. And for a long time, humans crushed the personalization team. There was something kind of in the example of how these marketers thought that was better, gonna get better and better and better,

till one day the personalization team, the volume started winning. And it kept winning. And there is no team that is sending newsletters around. And so, it turns out algorithmically on single products, you might be able to go and have a better algorithmic recommendations. I still think for quite a while,

there was a role for creative CFOs in thinking about these unexpected strategies. It's sort of in some ways like, I don't know, make it about you guys for a second. The media industry has been at it for a long time. You know, there's live streaming. You know, TV has been around for a while. No one saw this and suddenly, like,

this is one of the most, I think, important things happening you know, in broadcasting. It's your show. Thank you. You guys saw it. Yeah. And I think there's room for people of great taste, who are great marketers, who are great leaders, CFOs. And so, no, I'm bullish, actually,

when you have time to think about the interesting work. 100%, yeah. Like, there's one world where you see the expense policy as like a set of if statements, and there's a different world where you start thinking about expenses as like bets and risk taking and actual like what is the net present value of buying that particular thing?

Will this pay off for the business? Does this actually increase shareholder value when you buy even just those pencils versus those pens? Like that's really what you should be looking at. Also, I mean, yeah, there's so much, you know, finance historically is, you know, looking backwards and you can make decisions based on that and be like,

whoa, we spent this on this, we shouldn't do that again. But there's also so much that you can bring in of even helping understand projecting out. Did you know if you adopted this tool and then you grow headcount 20% or 30% or 100%, this is gonna be in a year, if you keep this existing plan, contract, you're gonna be spending some crazy multiple of what you're paying today so and there's so

much so what's next for the company is the job finished yeah everybody everybody in the chat asking job finish is the job finished the job is not finished guys I'm still we're still we can't believe it Still, we can't believe it. There's so much to do. Let's go. Job not finished confirmed. No, guys, this is, I love this thing. No, it's like, we're pleased, we're happy,

but this is the crazy thing about our industry, is that any business that spends money could be a ramp customer. And we've come a long way. They will be. They will be. They must be. They must be.

Sheds and the musts. I don't know, we're working hard on it. But guys most Most people you know, you know pour one out for our friends like expenses closing the books It is the worst hour of their month. It doesn't have to be We're gonna change that fantastic incredible. Well, thanks so much for stopping by It's a ton the ton of fun you later. I'll see you later and hopefully. Yeah, we'll see you later. And please recommend your tailor to me. I got to get one of these things. No, we'll put you in touch.

Let's read through Ben Thompson's analysis of the Figma S1, the Figma OS, and Figma's AI potential. Finally. Of course, in Manhattan for Figma's IPO tomorrow. We're very excited about that. We will be live from NYSEE, the New York Stock Exchange. Yes. Cannot wait.

So Bloomberg has a story here. Figma's initial public offering is approaching 40 times oversubscribed according to people familiar with the matter. Is that good? The design and collaboration software. We'll have to ask everyone tomorrow if it's good. Did they get the same revenue multiple

as how oversubscribed they are? Could be the year's most in-demand listing. The company is guiding prospective investors at its IPO, which could raise as much as $1.2 billion. It's expected to price above the marketed range. People said the San Francisco-based firm and some investors are offering 36.9 million shares at $30 to $32 per share after increasing the range Monday from $25 to $28 each. Order taking is expected to end at noon on Tuesday in New York. Bloomberg News has

reported oversubscription refers to when the number of orders for shares in the IPO exceeds shares that were originally offered. And so... A lot of demand for Figma shares, which makes sense. Exactly. It has been one of the most in-demand secondary. It helps you think bigger and build faster. That's right.

It helps design and development teams build great products together. What's not to like? Nothing like mixing an ad into, at least this is Ben Thompson's analysis, right? So, Ben Thompson is not sponsored by Figma. No, he's not. We had a friend of the show come on

and break down the S1 when the numbers dropped and it was kind of like the dream case for for SAS right for something out and immediately being the top You know for from a purely metric space like the top SAS company Yeah, and public SAS company and and and of course a lot of people point to the rule of 40 You add the growth rate to the burn rate, how much money you're losing. If you're losing a lot of money, but you're growing really fast, that's fine. If you're making a ton of money, but growing slower,

either way, they should add up to at least 40%, higher the better. And if you add FIGMAs up, they're in the 70%. So well beyond 40, 40%, according to the rule of 40, which is of course exciting to the venture capitalists who popularized the rule of 40, which is of course exciting to the venture capitalists who popularized the rule of 40. They basically created profitability. So he says, I think you can make the case that an $18 billion valuation is in fact too

low. Indeed, I think you could make the case that the company is worth more than $20 billion. Adobe agreed to buy it for $20 billion back in 2022. That of course is despite the rise of generative AI, which at first glance appear to be a threat to Figma. Cause you just go to chat GPT and say, Hey, build me a collaborative software tool and maybe it just makes mistakes. Don't make mistakes. Um, but he says I would go in the other direction. Generative generative AI and the opportunity it represents represents is exactly why Figma should go public, as Field strongly

suggests, and get ready to be acquisitive. Get ready to get bought. Do some deals. We love a Dylan Field deal. The Figma OS, Ben says, the reason why I'm optimistic about Figma comes from my belief that Figma is not simply design software, rather it's something much more fundamental and valuable, an operating system with a collaboration built in. Here is how I explained Figma

back when Adobe tried to acquire them. Forgive the long excerpt, he says, but it really is the point as far as my optimism about Figma is concerned. He says, here it is important to note that Figma's most prominent victim to date has not been Adobe, but rather Sketch. The explosion in apps led to a growing market

for product and design. Product design and development as designers needed to lay out a whole host of different app views and developers needed to know what exactly the designers wanted them to build. Photoshop and Illustrator, which were primarily focused on the creation and editing of single files, were the completely wrong tools for the job.

Sketch, which was released in 2010 as a Mac OS app and is still Mac OS only, although it now includes the ability to view files on the web, completely took the category by storm. Adobe eventually responded with Adobe XD, but not until 2015, and the product is still in third place. Sketch, though, is now only in second. Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com,

out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Continue, Jordy. Chris, the CEO of AdQuick is in New York as well. We're gonna try to meet up with him in a little bit. Sketch was not a disruptive product. It was, like Adobe's products, a desktop app. It just delivered a solution to an emerging product category

that Adobe was slow to respond to and that was like the designing of web and mobile products. Figma though was something completely new. The company which was founded in 2012 made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building V1 of the product. This included, which is just so funny because normally if you talk to a founder building a software company and they said, yeah, I'm three years in and I haven't shipped an MVP. You would just immediately write the company off

because why haven't you shipped? In this case, it was necessary. They- Quit your job, raise $10 million, Vibreel, launch video, slop product in two seconds. That's the flow, and then a ton of bugs, and then sort it out, and then maybe it works,

but it's a complete- Don't worry about securing personally identifiable information at all. Just get to the top of the charts and figure it out later. So this included writing the editor in C++, cross compiling it to JavaScript using the asm.js subset that let it achieve desktop-like control of memory

and performance and building its own rendering engine from scratch using WebGL, which had only been released in 2011. WebGL was the why now for the business and Dylan was very early to recognizing that. It was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector, which in this case was collaboration. And anybody under the age of 25 probably doesn't remember the pre-Figma era, but having different files and sending them back and forth and sending comments by email. Even personally, I only briefly was working without having access to Figma. So Ben says, think about my brief description for this product design and development segment.

Multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project, a designer and a developer. In reality, the huge number of views and increased functionality in apps meant that there was an increasingly large teams on both sides.

Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place, but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on the app together. Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got collaboration for free from the beginning. Yeah, this is a crazy screenshot. I don't know if we can show this, but on Figma's website, the company compares itself to Adobe XD, but I use Photoshop and Illustrator.

Don't stop. We believe you should use the best tool for the job if you're photo editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you're doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no-brainer. But if you're looking for the best tool for UX design, Figma is here for you. Plus, you can easily import images and SVG code into Figma

and have your cake and eat it too. And so, putting the competitors' products right there. So, eventually Photoshop and Adobe did launch a competitor called XD and XD wound up is getting killed by Figma but no one ever subscribed to Creative Cloud for XD, you just used it because it was here says Ben Thompson. Here's the problem though, to the extent

that Adobe's products were being used as part of Figma's workflow was the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long term relevance. Figma could for example the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long-term relevance. Figma could, for example, start investing much more heavily into its photo editing or illustration capabilities, rendering Adobe's products increasingly unnecessary. What is more threatening is Figma's cross-platform capabilities. Third-party developers can build plugins for Figma that make it possible to easily add

the sort of editing capabilities. So, regulators blocked the Adobe deal, and Ben Thompson says he thinks it was correct. The regulators got to correct that time and based on the run that Figma has been on ever since it seems like it could be a win for them as well. Yeah, and and it's interesting these... Sane roller coaster for the team. Yeah, and and Figma I think during the acquisition process clearly didn't have the Insane urgency to launch new products because they thought they were going to You know Adobe and would be part of an organization with a bunch of different Individual apps and and watching how they reacted after it was blocked and then came yeah and just started shipping

Yeah, like crazy and so the FTC is gone after Some some mergers that have made no sense. Like I believe they blogged. Like Roomba. The Roomba one, yeah, that one didn't make sense. The worst example I can think of is Meta bought a VR fitness app

and they said that Meta was trying to create a monopoly in the VR fitness market, which is just not a market at all. It doesn't even exist. And I don't know anyone that does VR fitness and it's very rare. And so it totally makes sense to let that team get an exit and go hang out at Meta and try and work on this until- Creating the market for VR.

Creating the market. And then as soon as it takes off, there's gonna be a ton of competitors immediately. And so it seems like totally fine to let that one go through. And then there are other sides where like, truly there are like two players and they're merging and there's going to be a lot of a lot of competitive dynamics that come from that anyway Let me tell you about Bezel pre-owned luxury watches authenticated in-house

Bezel is the top marketplace in the world for authenticated luxury watches. Yeah, and again just more context so Amazon Amazon's acquisition of iRobot the maker of Roa, was blocked due to antitrust concerns, which was primarily from the European Commission. They were worried about a monopoly in home robotics, I guess, and the CEO ended up just resigning. It's interesting, it's like the robotic vacuum market is extremely competitive because of a lot of the Chinese companies, like Oofofy and there's a few others like it is definitely not as much of like

it feels like a lot less of a sticky product because yes it maps your home and it's supposed to learn but really if you move to a new place and you get a different robot vacuum cleaner like you're pretty much good after a day you're not like oh I can't get out of the Roomba ecosystem. Yeah. Whereas like even Sonos is stickier than that. And so I never had a problem with that. And iRobot shares are down 95% over the last looking. We actually got blocked and then they just got cooked. Yeah they actually went public July 31st 2020.

No way. Stock popped to $133 a share by early 2021. It's now sitting at $4 and 28 cents 130 million 130 million so a little bit of value destruction from the European that'd be really good I'm getting out to like the most logical acquire possible so figmas position and the AI potential consider the position Figma has in the software design process. First, Figma enables collaboration, their original differentiator from Adobe and Sketch. Second, Figma creates one canvas for app creation, everything based on the same URL, instead of files that are passed around with increasingly absurd file name appendages, you know, final,

final, final, V3, V4, V1, final, final. Third, Figma serves as a source of truth for an app's design. These capabilities seamlessly translate into AI-enabled workflows. And so- And these capabilities seamlessly translate to AI-enabled workflows.

Collaboration today between a host of humans could very well mean coordination and orchestration of AI. Critically, Figma isn't assuming or relying on an AI doing everything. Granted, that is a theoretical threat to the company, but the problem with AI-only development processes is that they are extremely difficult to debug or decompose. Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI. So Ben Thompson kind of closes out talking about Figma as the OS of design being important.

What operating systems have is coordination and orchestration abilities, one canvas where all the work happens. So the source of truth. And then for now, Figma gets its nascent AI, it gates the capabilities behind a full seat license, i.e. the most expensive plans. They also have usage-based model,

but Ben Thompson is advocating for Figma to move towards some sort a usage-based model. But Ben Thompson is advocating for Figma to move towards some sort of usage-based or task-based monetization model. This is what Salesforce is doing. Yeah, selling work. Yeah, Salesforce is doing this. Selling the end product. Exactly, as opposed to seat-based.

And so that will be a business model transition. And he says that the transition will be tricky, and it's arguably the best argument against Figma going public, because if all of a sudden you shift to, hey, we don't charge per seat, we charge per finished design, or finished website, or shipped website,

then all of a sudden you could see that you wind up with a much better business model four quarters out, but you have two rough quarters, and the public markets don't like that, and people always talk about that being one of the reasons, one of the drawbacks of being public is that you have a lot of investors that are a little bit more short-term oriented. But he says, I think, however, that it is notable that Field mentioned M&A in his argument

for going public. Figma would do well to start acquiring AI companies to plug into every aspect of its stack, particularly now when AI capability is nascent and not yet a threat to Figma as a whole. Above, I was skeptical about AI replacing Figma, but that is a skepticism that is relevant for the short term. Figma's task is to replace itself before anyone else has the chance in the long term. Looks like we have our first guest. Let's bring him in.

Andrew Reed. Somebody confused me I'm not but he is close by what's going on Andrew. Welcome to stream. You're alive. How you doing you are live? Yes, we're very happy to be decision to put on the suits six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this. Is this my microphone? That's your microphone.

Yeah, wonderful. How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you? Let's see. Well, first off, congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange. Thank you.

Thank you. It's been really exciting. Today has been a good day. You open. Dylan, ring the bell at 930, and it's 2, good day you know you open yeah don't ring the bell at 930 and it's 2 11 p.m. Eastern right now so we've been milling around for many hours and a little exhausting it opened and yeah it's amazing seeing the team here yeah and just the excitement of everyone chanting figma and seeing all the traders in there swagged out Figma jackets. The jackets are fantastic. The jackets are amazing. I'm going to go and start market bidding jackets after this

because those are totally iconic. The thing that stood out to me is all the little, like they really made, they really made Nicely their home. Like every single place you look, there's something Figma, and it's just so incredibly well done. Yeah, and this one of my, one of the experiences I've had with Figma, dating back to when we first invested seven years ago, was it's a company that's always

had extraordinary attention to detail, and it shows up when you do an all hands at their office. The board slides the S1, config the conference, and how they applied that attention to detail to the NYSE is incredible. Because applying the attention to detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground

and the party outside, they just did an unbelievable job. They have to be doing things that haven't been done before. Yeah. I think the takeover outside was breathtaking. And I'm obviously very biased because when I see the people logo because I get very excited. Did you see the road show? Did you go to any of the road show? I heard there was like a long product demo there. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's, I think this is true for, you know, uh, many CEOs, but especially for Dylan, like Dylan cares a lot about the product and it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what FIGMET, not just what FIGMET stands for in design and creativity and all the things you see, but really how the product works.

And it was not a five minute fly by, look at the cool, shiny features. The product demo was, they were in the weeds. It was, I in fact uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed but it was good I think it's important again like part of you know that's a cool Dylan is right he like actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and yeah and every single feature and then that shows through and yeah how early did you actually meet Dylan Sarah Sarah Guo was

posting earlier that pre-launch they were burning $800,000 a month. Which just sounds like that's the most nerve-racking scenario for any, you know, a lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special foundry was? Well Dylan and Evan by the way, I think just, I think it's a nice moment to take a pause and just give a shout out to Evan Wallace. And he's like an absolute legend. I think the stories that people here tell about Evan are just, you know, they'll go on. Chris, who's going to come on next, you know,

is the Figma CTO. He'll, I think, have a lot of, he'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base, but allegedly it's insane. And, you know. Well and just going, like taking another step back, people have, like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your products.

And I think most, like almost always when I hear a founder say, well Figma took four years, I go, well you're not Evan Wallace. And you're not like fundamentally changing, you you know the way that like software works online yeah you you're just you're building enterprise workflow workflows you should probably ship like next month yeah the other thing about the you know you can take take as long as you need you know Figma there's this there's a something that real love talks a lot about for

our business, which is the Red Queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And I think in a world of accelerating technology change, like in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more. And obviously like AIs allow companies to do a lot more. Isn't the Red Queen race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's just the truth of technology, I think. It's the truth of venture capital and the truth of enterprise software, business. And if you look at how, you know, when Figma went from

four products to eight products at Config, right? Like the pace, I think everyone who uses the product feels it, like the pace is just picking up. Yeah, we got a little preview of, and I messaged Nairi. I was like, wait, you're announcing all of this? Like all four of these? It was like four major announcements, and that's what picking up the pace looks like, finding that new gear.

How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about there's taking designers and giving them the ability to ship code. They're kind of this flip from going from a zero X engineer, a designer to a one X engineer. And that gain can sometimes be better

than taking a 10 X engineer and making them a little bit better because you just unlock this new capability. How are you thinking about, companies just broadly thinking about AI as a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company? What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

I've been thinking about that question a lot. The way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored In a meeting, I think similarly all of us are going to be capable of creating something on the internet It's actually interactive exactly and I think that has been happening for a while I think it's picking up steam in an incredible pace. Yeah, and I think this role of creative technologist I think you know in big companies just still probably have siloed engineering,

product design, marketing teams. I think in our small companies, like the founding engineers, founding teams, people are wearing a lot of hats, right? And using tools like Figma to do everything from ideation to prompt something, to iterate, get in the hands of users, and to actually publish code.

I think that, the small companies, I bet will leave the way. My buddy Andreessen said that when I was first pitching them, we weren't actually raising it. I didn't have a deck. And so I just was in Figma screen sharing, showing them the product and showing them all the different ways that we were going to take it and things like that.

And again, that's just evidence of Figma not being for designers. No. I never thought it was a tool for building things. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One dynamic Ben Thompson has been talking about is that as a public company, sometimes it can be easier to do M&A. Have you ever run into that in your career, just broadly of a company that, where that

is an important factor in kind of their long-term strategy. I've always generally the meme has been like stay private as long as possible. But you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits. But what are the what is the M&A dynamic in public and private markets right now? Yeah, I think the you know, there's what you learn when you start out of Goldman Sachs. And it's you know, it's you have access to the capital market You can eat a public currency for M&A, you know, blah blah blah tell your story to me the The the reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago And it's like feeling the energy you guys were there felt the energy amongst the community

like the incredible community surrounding Figma. And then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the broader world. And on the S1 we reported I think 13 million monthly active users, two-thirds of which are not designers. Did you note, was that your guess early on? Did you fully see that the TAM for this was not like how many designers are there and just like add it up and multiply it? Did you, I imagine you believe that it could be used across? The TAM expanded.

It's similar to what I was saying with the, I think the creative technologist archetype who's going to do a lot of things and eventually in 10 years the way that companies run their product engineering teams will probably look very different. I think similarly, like, there were even, you know, predating our investment, there were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the FIGMO way, collaborative way of building products. And you had, you know had full product engineering design teams at small companies, or even at mid-sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio

and we talked to them before we invested and they were early at pioneering this. We're getting off of the drop-off links being sent around. We're going all in on working in Figma. And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly and therefore the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years.

I think similarly some small companies are going to pioneer new ways of doing things. They're going to move really fast. It's going to be obvious that there's like a new archetype emerging. I think many of those people are going to live in Figma. I think the most creative community on the internet today already exists in Figma. It felt even, I remember using it as a social app. In the sense that I would get, it would be late at night, I would open my laptop and I'd be like, oh, Brandon's up.

I'd go over to wherever he was designing, I'd be like, hey, what's up, dude? I was type of comment. And it was almost like a lot of people built these in these virtual offices. But Kugma was our virtual office. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. I'd just be like, hey, what's up?

Or I'd just mess with them and change the button colors. Yeah. And the one thing I'm really excited about with the new products is they're both raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in Figma, you know, like with FigmaDraw for instance, right? Like the ability to do like really interesting artistic creative work inside of Figma files and also massively raising the floor for those of us who are, you know, more Excel inclined and

our, you know, creative abilities.. Yeah exactly, exactly. And I think it's so rare to find technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things. Usually there's a trade off. And yeah, it's really exciting. I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose, but just decades ago, right? Totally. Yeah.

And similarly to the idea of Figma slides came out of this intuition, or not even intuition, it's the reality that many people were torquing Figma files in the slide decks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a file called deck formatting. Yeah. I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of like, this is how I build decks.

This is how I build fundraising decks. Here's like 50 examples for each page. And I would just send it out to everyone. They could just copy it and start working off of it. That sounds great. It's great. We don't have to make many decks at TBPM. It really does. We should start making more decks just for each other.

We should. Yeah. That'd be great. Last question, I think we'll let you go. I want to talk about the culture and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that. How do you describe the culture of someone who's a good fit to become a fig mate? Ooh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting. As the series C lead.

Well, yeah. When I was reflecting on what I was going to tweet today, because there's always a fine balance, right? Like how do I tweet something to say congrats without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing? I kind of went into a very paranoid headspace of how do I get, you know, not end up in the wrong quadrant. We just go too far. You're welcome. You said, congrats to the incredible Figma team, the most creative, determined, imaginative, and positive group of of people I'm just so happy for all of your success. There we go. I was I almost responded our success So those those four adjectives I think they are they're

Creative yeah, I think I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at config about how everybody Everybody who was that config would be a good tattoo artist for my face painting artist for my daughter and my brother, so that analogy did not land. They're very creative, I think they were extremely determined. I think this is a company that when the early days of burning however much money they were burning a month

and not having product market fit and grinding your way to product market fit, and all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really started their ascent. you still have like the hardcore WebGL crew yeah and that's like all it's not like quite like foundation model it's like serious engineering it's a company that does hard things they are not afraid of doing really hard things yes I think they're imaginative I think that's like you know the make-believe billboard you see in San Francisco it's a company that

really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology and they're positive. Like they are just good human beings. And you know, looking at obviously the reaction to the IPO is just look around. These are awesome people who are so cool. The valedictorian of my high school works at Figma. Her name is Katie Zito.

She's a legend. A PM here. She's literally like theedictorian of my high school works at Figma. Her name's Katie Zito. She's a PM here. She's literally like the smartest person I knew in high school and she builds products at Figma. Anyway, I'm just so happy with it. I really am happy for their success and your success. Yeah. We're happy for you. I didn't put it out, but yesterday we did the,

we did it meme with Ramp. Oh yeah. I sent you that. Yeah, that was great. And now we're. But now Ramp's congratulating Figma Yesterday we did the we did it meme with ramp But now ramps congratulating figma with the big billboard today You know they had that idea Monday Yeah on the phone with them there like yeah I think we might get a banner and like Hank because we're our offices right across the street from figmas New York office We just hang it out and it's like this like 40. It's unbelievable We should just hang it out. And it's like this 40 by 40.

It's unbelievable. It looks like it's a Figma canvas. I will say the ramp thinking Figma with TBPN and the New York Stock Exchange, today is a big day. Yeah, today is a big day for us. It's a big day. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, it's lovely having you.

Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, thanks for being here. Enjoy talking to everyone else. Yes, we will. And obviously, I hope to see you later. Let's be great. Congratulations on your success, too. Congratulations.

Let's give a little bit of coverage of updates on the Figma IPO. Of course, there was a funny post in here from Jawan. Jawan apparently got an offer back in 2019. Okay, oof. That's 3C territory. And he was gonna get a base of 165K a year and 300,000 in Figma RSUs. 300,000 shares. And I guess by his calculation

it would have turned into 30 million. But the important thing, Jawan is now getting the ability to spend his time automating finance. Yes. And certainly didn't pick a bad company to join on that front. No, he's doing great. Gary Tan says, if you stick around in tech and you're good,

sooner or later you start collecting these stories. Yeah. I think I remember Gary designed the Palantir logo back in the day. Crazy. And I wonder if he held on Yeah More Seeky ran some numbers Seeky chins. So there's 10x returners. There's fund returners and there's figma

figma alone returned 10x the entire fund of not one not two, but three VC funds so He pulls up index ventures which made their initial investment out of a seed fund The it was a four million dollar investment or 3.9 million out of a four hundred million dollar fund and it is a one thousand eight hundred and50 X multiple. Their current- Was the multiple a fund on that? The fund multiple is 18 X. Greylock, who did this- That's so crazy. Greylock, who just did the Series A,

is sitting on an 11 X fund. They did the Series A out of a $600 million fund. KP, which did the Series B, is sitting on a 10 X fund out of a $700 million fund, which is just wild. And then Sequoia will have returned one and a half X on a two and a half billion dollar fund. That's great.

Just from that one deal. And then there's other stuff important. And Gary chimes in and says, "'Grand Slam home run business.'" Yep, yep. It's not just a home run business. It's a, grand slam home run business. It's not just a home run business, it's a grand slam home run business. This is good advice for all the VCs out there. Just get one figment in your pocket.

I noted this on the timeline yesterday, but we are retiring the gong that we had at NICI yesterday. It's a game hit gong by none other than Dillon Field. So we still need to get him to sign it and date it of course but pretty pretty pretty wild. Dillion says greatest capital markets on earth greatest country on earth and throws up not one but three American flags quoting signals not one, but three American flags quoting signals. Signals post, he said, nothing hits like an IPO in America.

It's the most iconic cultural moment that's relatively infrequent. The most beautiful part about it is that only here does a company going public trigger a national feedback loop of inspiration. Kids watch it, builders feel it, and the next gen catches fire. Nowhere else turns liquidity into legacy.

So. So that was a funny posting stuff. Very, very unique. Good job. And yeah, pretty, pretty insane. Yeah.