Figma gave employees a clear choice after the Adobe deal fell through

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 6:47

   remember I mentioned this to you. But for me, the story of telling 1,200 employees of a startup, we have one of the most incredible exits in history, $20 billion exit of this company, and it's not going to happen. What was the all hands like when you get in front of everyone and you tell everyone, guys, this isn't going to happen? And how do you get everyone to realign on building a business and continuing forward when it feels like the floor, for some people may have felt like the floor fell out from under them.

2. 7:20

   Well, I think you have to remember the length of the regulatory review, which definitely needs to be fixed somehow because it's, you know, if you're in a situation where it's actually anti-competitive, which I still don't believe the Adobe thing was for what it's worth. A lot of people, you know, on the internet probably would say it is, uh like or at least they did back then but i thought their arguments were poor and they were fighting past battles not looking at the future and what this all would become uh but the um and i say that not because i'm not like i'm stoked to be independent too i'm stoked to be running figma that was the plan for adobe was just run figma uh either way uh running figma i'm happy independently we do move fast i'm glad i'm grateful for that but uh going back to your question it's like we had 16 months of regulatory

3. 8:12

   review 16 months of regulatory review for any company is punishing and uh in an actual anti-competitive situation that could be like very destructive for one of the parties right Or both. And I think Roomba is a great example, actually. Roomba was going to be acquired. Small deal. Yeah, it wasn't like a crazy deal. But they want to punish Amazon. And so they did not let it go through. And because of that, Roomba went bankrupt.

4. 8:41

   And the entire market at the time basically went to China. So from the United States standpoint, it made no sense. Anyway, I go on a tangent, but I do think it's an important point. There's some policy stuff here that's like when you go for the idealism, It doesn't always practically, like, help America. But it's also an important point, which is almost all markets now are more expansive than they have been historically.

5. 9:05

   And nearly anything that looks like, oh, it's the market, that's not actually the market. The market is AI, it turns out. Yeah, I mean, exactly. The market is this massive market, and this deal is 1% and 0.2% of the market. Yeah, it's like, do you define the market looking back at the history, which is like the only logical way you do it as a regulator? Or do you do it as a technologist looking forward?

6. 9:29

   And that could be very different in terms of how you think about markets, about sizes. But in any case, the all hands, it was actually the first day of a winter break, which is pretty funny. So we had told everybody, okay, you know, enjoy the holidays. we actually have way less traffic during the holidays because we're a work product and that was a friday and then um realized sort of over the weekend okay this is going to come to a conclusion and on monday morning uh sent a message to everybody saying hey all hands at noon and uh dial in if you like and here's what's going on and here's like the full sort of uh details And so, first of all, so much of the company showed up.

7. 10:17

   That was awesome just to see the turnout. You know, first day of break, really. And secondly, I'd say just like the mood was relief. Because it wasn't about relief of not Adobe. It was relief of not having ambiguity. To have ambiguity that long is really intense. And people have to kind of have two worlds in their head. They're not exactly sure what the future holds. So that was the immediate mood.

8. 10:40

   It was just kind of like lighter. And then from there, yeah, I think that the question you asked is, right, how do you make sure everyone's all in? And the way that we did it was we said, look, I just kind of put a video out into the company Slack and emailed everybody and said, hey, if you're tired after working really hard, if you're someone who joined during this period thinking you're going to go work at Adobe and actually the startup thing is not for you, like please know we're going to be working very hard hustling hard and no shame like we're still on good terms if you want to leave here is a few months pay uh and you're welcome to just let us know we'll make it super easy and from there uh you know six months before you can reapply that's the only condition uh after six months you can reapply and we'll uh re-interview you

9. 11:41

   and it was a pretty small percentage of people that took us up on that but overall it was healthy and some people actually ended up doing total career pivots like in wild ways uh went on different life paths like i think it's healthy for everyone you continue