unstrategic

> Rust isn't some silver bullet

Rust codebases extend in size and scale to larger teams fundamentally better than C++ / C. Rust offers more leverage in building ambitious system software.

Since you mention Qt, imagine writing all of Qt in x86 assembly, vs. C++. "There's not particular reason this isn't doable." C++ to Rust is a similar jump. No silver bullets; just leverage.

Cross-platform toolkits — especially those aiming to abstract over native UI/UX patterns — are an ambitious, if not Sisyphean domain. Qt was about the best we could do in the C++ era, but a new era has dawned.

Sounds a lot like the effect of venture capital in the present day.

> First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds

Convince talented technical innovators that the best way they can apply themselves is to become a 'business person'"; then, talk to VCs and feel important by spending a lot of money instead of building something

> Secondly, the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results

Do whatever VCs think is hot

> For a few years there might be a great increase in scientific output

The last 15 years?

> There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.

Yep.

> the difference between this and an IPO is academic in my view

More theatrical than academic — if both options have a risky short-term outlook, optimize for the story.

Sold for $20B? Or lackluster IPO? As GP of a VC fund, which story is going to better-enable you to raise your next several funds?

Arguably, the money game is exactly what Figma was playing all along. Dylan's good at this game, as are the VCs he partnered with.

Figma's flagship product was private equity. The design tool was secondary.

> It's that Adobe was likely seeing subscription revenue take hit from customers

While being pummeled by public markets, and being forced to make a move that might keep shareholders from calling for blood.

This is certainly not the first time that Adobe has presented a number to Figma's board — but it has to be the biggest number yet, by far.

From Figma's position: take your chances on an IPO while the Fed is cracking skulls around inflation — or flip the bit on that liability, and cash out to a desperate Adobe?

"Hand-off" describes a paradigm of designer/developer collaboration where a designer creates a mock-up or prototype, then "hands off" that picture to a developer who then creates the "real thing."

Hand-offs are wildly inefficient, and the fidelity of creativity & artistic expression gets largely butchered on its way into the final medium.

Contrast with a design tool like Webflow, Flash, HyperCard, or Visual Basic, where the product of the design process is production software. Figma could have gone down this route — a harder route, admittedly, but ripe for innovation — and they chose not to.[1]

Good for them: $20B. Bad for the world.

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[1] Sho's vision is that design _should_ live in a separate world, and that hand-offs are the ideal form of collaboration — because they enable design to be unfettered by the constraints of production software. I would call this a failure of imagination: it is quite possible to explore free-form design ideas within and around production software: c.f. Macromedia Flash.

So they made a slightly better Adobe.

Figma is all about collaborating on software — yet they don't touch software. They have been incrementally innovative in involving design-adjacent stakeholders in the design process, but the elephant in room is "how do we collaborate on _software itself_," rather than pictures of software?

When you have copywriters, designers, managers, and biz making pull requests to a Github repo via a design tool — that will be world-changing. This COULD have been our world already, but this paradigm is against Adobe's entrenched interests. Figma just played Adobe's game, and netted a cool $20B for it.

When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they extinguished an entire paradigm of design tool: "design tools that create software." Back in the booming 90's, this paradigm was _the future_.

Through that acquisition, Adobe shoe-horned the world into a paradigm of "hand-offs," and Figma's leadership (namely, Sho) doubled down on the "hand-off" vision. "Play Adobe games."

The future for collaborating on software design & build looks more like Flash, and less like Photoshop (though obviously, not quite like either.) "Exactly as anti-innovative."

Sure, $2T — a fundamental innovation in how we "design and build" software has implications as far-reaching as the World Wide Web itself. Google IS the World Wide Web — they have previously broken a $2T market cap.

Figma was never on track to change the world. They were an Adobe clone from the beginning, out-executing them, but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative.

Not that $20B is anything to shake a stick at — but real innovation in this market will be worth one to two orders of magnitude more. Figma was scratching at this with their "whole org collab" vision and FigJam, but they lacked the vision to crack it, and their execution has been faltering since their early talent started jumping ship. Selling to a desperate Adobe, distressed by public markets, is the perfect chance to "fail up."

Why am I disappointed in Figma? Because they could have been so much more. Because in effect, they have held the creative world back by doubling down & cashing in on Adobe's corruption of design tooling. Play Adobe games, win Adobe prizes. It's just a shit game, and peanuts compared to latent opportunity in this space.