A lot of people aren't ready to hear this, but FIG stock has a lot of room to run and can pick up some unexpected (for some) momentum down the line. I'll try to be brief, but I'm terrible with words - I didn't pay attention in english class.
First, let me address the bears. Each bearish take I read on Figma is maximum regarded and it's the same boring regurgitated takes over and over again which somehow all - and lazily - conflate what Figma and any new LLM providers do as a core business. "AI DISRUPTION RISK, SEAT-BASED MODEL BREAKING, -X% OFF ITS IPO HIGH, ITS GOING TO ZERO, I DO WITH CLAUDE DESIGN WHAT I USED TO IN FIGMA HA HA HA". Alright squirt, take a sit while daddy lays it out for you while you don't have a novel thought in your head.
Yes, Figma is down a lot. Yes, anyone with a brain knew there was going to be a boom bust IPO cycle. No, its not because they're failing as a business. If you bought at the highs of the IPO or have gotten shaken out of your shares, feel sorry for you bro - there is still money to be made. The truth is the market has some shares to digest as they've become public this past year.
Alright, now that I've put the bears in their place, let me explain why Figma is going to blow some heads in the coming future. I expect this company to become irrationally valued once this thesis catches on (if it doesn't my wife is going to kill me).
It's important to understand that Figma, with Dylan Field at the helm, has done - at least - two incredibly impressive things:
- Built a highly performant multiplayer collaboration web tool
- Built digital design software on top of this stack that was/is leagues ahead of any competitor (then and now) that everyone loves and uses.
Figma is objectively the gold standard of widespread collaborative digital design software outside of niche areas which competitors like Adobe still dominate in. They are everywhere and if you're in a company producing software, you probably use them.
So, let me summarize so far:
- They are everywhere
- They are the undisputed champions of general digital creation on top of a highly performant tech stack
- They've been building this great software for a little over a decade
- Financials are good. The company has $1.6B on hand, is debt free, is growing 40% YoY, has a strategic investment arm (Figma ventures). There is some stock based compensation being digested, but that will pass. They haven't even entertained "cutting costs" yet (its literally not a priority)
Now, let me do you the favor - so you don't have to think - of laying out the grand vision of Dylan Field for Figma that is going to 🚀🚀🚀 the company into tendieland.
But before that, a quick note on Dylan Field. If you aren't aware of Dylan, he is nothing short of a generational leader. His vision, tenacity, ambition, etc, to succeed with Figma are what we call rare. To put it bluntly, this guy basically wants to be another Steve Jobs while being a humble nice guy who is incredibly smart. He's by all measures a rare leader and better than you or I will ever be. He's the type of leader you believe in, not doubt. So much so, he believed in himself and dropped out of Brown to start Figma after receiving a grant from Peter Thiel who also believed in him (look how that turned out so far).
Ok, so, Dylan Field good guy, built a great company, where does it go from here? (🚀)
Have you guys heard of LLM's/AI? Like the ones Anthropic (and others) build? The ones where companies scraped the internet of information and code and ran it through some fancy algorithm to give us some nice slop that generally works well when you use your brain a little bit? Not going to make the gardener a brain surgeon, but generally a net positive for access to information - much better than google searching.
Ok, cool, you have. So, you must also be aware that the algorithms that train these things basically summarize its training data (can be any data - public or p