E96: Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO's recession warning, macro picture & more

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
I literally don't want to talk about brigading, guys, though, only because it's getting crazy. And I had to, like, mod my stuff.

**David Sacks** (0:05)
So start the recording, please start the recording. I'm going to strike it by brigades. You mean like MAGA brigades?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:10)
All right.

**David Sacks** (0:11)
Listen, no, I'm serious. You think because I can call them all, you want me to call them off?
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hey, Donnie, hey, Donnie.
Jake Alstead, he's being brigaded by MAGA. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't handle it. He's tapping out. I tap out.
Can you call off the dogs? OK, all right. It's all good. It's all good. You're talking to the dogs? It's over. They're not going to brigade anymore. The sign up is over.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:38)
Thank you. Thank you. It was getting pretty, it was getting pretty acute.
All right, everybody. Welcome to episode 96 of the All-In Podcast. We had a bomb drop just yesterday with Adobe agreeing to acquire Figma, the design tool, we'll get into that in a minute, what it actually does, for $20 billion. This is just astounding for this to happen, period, full stop. It's the largest private company purchase, I believe, in history.
This company, if you don't know, it helps you design web apps or user interfaces. So if you're a designer, we used to make mock-ups, we'd send them around in the industry as images or PDFs. And then like Google Docs, where you can put comments on somebody else's words and you can collaborate in real-time, we call it multiplayer mode. Figma is multiplayer mode. The company is just a juggernaut. If you work in startups, you get Figma designs all day. And Adobe stock got crushed because of this, was down as much as 18% on Thursday. Figma's most recent valuation was $10 billion in June of 2021
They're Series E, so peak market. They had raised $200 million at that time. There's a lot of details to get into here. But, you know, listen, let's ask the Sultan of SaaS here what you think of this, because it's double what was an incredible market last year that was overheated. So what does this say about the market? Figma, you know, Figma itself, or maybe Adobe's, you know, jumping the fence or being skittish?
How do we reconcile this, Sacks?

**David Sacks** (2:31)
Well, if you judge Adobe stock price the other day, the market hated the deal. I mean, the Adobe stock price went down like 15% and that's a $150 billion company, roughly. So they lost almost the entire purchase price in the market capitalization of Figma. I think that's.
That's basically an overreaction. I, you know, I know all the news is basically on how Adobe is paying 50 times and that's no longer the multiple. The multiple is more like, you know, 8, 9, 10 times for high-growth SaaS companies.
There is truth to that, but I think it misses some important details about how fast Figma is growing. Can we actually throw up on the screen the AR history of this company? So.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:18)
And for people who know the multiple is the multiple times top line revenue.

**David Sacks** (3:22)
Times ARR, really.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:24)
So explain that to folks. Yeah.

**David Sacks** (3:26)
Well, ARR is just the annually recurring revenue. It's subscription revenue. Sometimes people will look at next 12 months revenue, which is a similar concept, not quite the same, but sort of in the ballpark.
So you know, what's interesting about this company, I think it was founded 2011, 2012 It had a very long wilderness period. That's what I call the period where the founders are trying to figure out what the product is going to be.
Really for almost five years, they finally launched a private beta in 2015 They then opened it up to public launch in 2016 And they didn't turn on monetization until 2017 So five years into the company, they hadn't made a dime. So it's roughly a 10 year old company. And for the first five years didn't make any money. And then they started to make money five years ago. And then in 2018, I think they turned on the enterprise tier.
And then it's been kind of off to the races.
Yeah, what I can tell you looking at these numbers, by the way. So I don't know if these numbers are perfectly correct. This is sort of I would call the scuttlebutt numbers. These are numbers that I believe to be true. But it's not like these are numbers that the company's confirmed or anything like that. This is just me gathering intelligence from talking to people in Silicon Valley. So this is what I believe to be the case.