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I can’t believe how many retail investors are missing the big picture on Figma. It is no longer the same company as Adobe tried to acquire for $20B. It’s definitely grown bigger and more disruptive than ever in the AI era.
What O365 is for productivity, Figma is for creativity.
By creativity, I don’t mean just design, but an end to end digital product creation platform. They have moved past Adobe, Sketch, and others as the competition. They have now set their sights on Cursor, Lovable, and other AI coding platforms. And they will win because those tools are largely single-player and code-first with no enterprise lock-in moat.
That’s why Google invested. That’s why institutions are positioning. That’s why the stock seems to have found a floor despite lock-ups expiring.
**MULTI-PLAYER ADVANTAGE**
Figma didn’t beat Adobe XD, Sketch, and others because it packed more designer features. It won because it was multiplayer by default.
* Browser native
* Real-time collaboration
* Design systems
Scalable product development is inherently collaborative. This is Figma’s premise, and this is why they Cursor, Lovable, and others will hit the ceiling in enterprise environments.
**ADOBE ALREADY TOLD YOU WHAT IT WAS WORTH**
Adobe offered $20B to acquire Figma in 2022. At that time:
* ARR was rougely \~$400M
* Figma was just a design collab tool
* AI wasn’t core to the product story yet
Fast forward:
* ARR now \~$1B+
* Product suite has expanded massively
Adobe tried to buy the *seed*. The market is now pricing the *tree* like it’s still a sapling.
**FIGMA IS THE INDUSTRY STANDARD**
This is the most underappreciated part. The enteprrise has standardized around Figma which means:
* Hiring for positions include (“must know Figma”)
* Process changes
* Governance changes
Switching becomes organizationally painful. This enterprise lock-in is a massive advantage and what will drive them to win despite the early advantages of popular AI coding platforms today. Think how Microsoft Teams won vs Slack, in the end. But this time, with a much bigger value proposition in Figma with its coherent AI strategy and inherent multi-player strength that other platforms won’t be able to compete with.
Not to mention the amount of legal, security, privacy, and integration requirements they need to deal with in order to activate scale in an enterprise. Figma is already there.
**COMPLETE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM**
While most companies slap AI on top, Figma does something far more intentional. It is taking the entire product development lifecycle and weaving every step together from ideation (Figjam), design & prototyping (Design), build (Make), and deployment (Site) of apps with AI, all with the affordance of human agency in the process.
If you think about what Cursor and Lovable did is hard. It is really not. What’s hard is integrating features in a way that feels complete, cohesive, and easy-to-use. How many enterprises will risk having a disjointed design and development tooling ecosystem when they can have everything in one platform?
The role of the designer and developer are converging. And the most value will come from the most creative of endeavors, not the fastest created but looks cookie-cutter.
**STRATEGIC ASSET FOR THE BIG PLAYERS:**
Ask yourself:
* If google wanted a true end-toend product creation stack
* If Microsoft wanted to own creation beyond Office
* If Amazon wanted a creative + dev OS
There are very few platforms that sit in the intersection of enterprise, creation, collaboration, AI, and design systems. That scarcity matters.
The potential for big acquisition is not far-fetched.
**Personal Position:** I’ve been accumulating shares since the stock hit its floor at around \~$34 and believes this will have a big move, once more of us catch on to the true potential.