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**I don't know why my post got deleted earlier but I would like to re-post anyway.**
Just sharing my big picture point of view on Figma and get other perspectives from the community here.
I think Figma is no longer the same company that Adobe tried to acquire for $20B. It’s definitely grown bigger (in terms of ARR + suite of AI offerings) and more disruptive than ever in the age of AI.
What O365 is for productivity, Figma is for creativity.
By creativity, I don’t mean just being a design collaboration tool like what most consider it as, but an end to end digital product creation platform which is the anchor to my bullish outlook for this company.
In my opinion, they have moved past Adobe, Sketch, and others as they are the clear industry leader now in the product design space and have now set their sights on Cursor, Lovable, and other AI coding platforms.
My big bet is they will win because those tools are largely single-player and code-first with no enterprise lock-in moat.
This was further solidified when I saw Google invested. Institutions are positioning and the stock seems to have found a floor despite lock-ups expiring.
Here are my supporting theses:
1. **Figma beat Adobe XD, Sketch, and others because it was a multiplayer platform by design, not because it packed more designer features.**
* Browser native
* Real-time collaboration
* Design systems
Scalable product development is inherently collaborative. This is Figma’s premise, and this is why Cursor, Lovable, and others will hit the ceiling in enterprise environments.
2. **Adobe offered $20B to acquire Figma in 2022, before AI coding platforms became cool.**
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
That it is valued below what Adobe was willing to pay then seems interesting. And what led me to frame this POV.
3. **Enterprise Lock-in.** This may be the most under-appreciated part. The enterprise has standardized around Figma which means hiring for positions include (“must know Figma”) along with process and governance changes which are hard to break.
Switching becomes organizationally painful. This enterprise lock-in is a massive advantage and what will drive them to win despite the early advantages of AI coding platforms. Think how Microsoft Teams won vs Slack, in the end. But this time, with a much bigger value proposition in Figma in 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, and privacy requirements they need to deal with in order to activate scale in an enterprise. Figma is already there.
4. **Complete AI Co-Creation Suite.** 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 and curation in the process.
One commenter from my earlier post highlighted that Figma have acquired PayLoadCMS last year. This will help them accelerate a "design to CMS-powered website" workflow that will eat away from platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and WP.
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?
5. **The role of the designer and developer are converging.** One way to look at it is, the pool of seats (i.e. TAM) became larger as designers get into engineering work while developers get into design.
This is powerful as the most value will always come from the most creative of endeavors, not the fastest created but looks cookie-cutter.
6. **A potential acquisition target to big tech giants.** Now this is highly speculative but:
* What if google wanted a true end-to-end product creation stack
* What if Microsoft wanted to own creation beyond Office
* What 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 investors catch on to the true potential.
Adding a screenshot of my position just to show that I have skin in the game, and I'm invested for the long-term.
https://preview.redd.it/r6izjkpajucg1.png?width=1726&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ab1cabc8bc512a745f01d92247ea7cdc39eb25b