How AI splits startups into winners and losers | E2322

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back. It's This Week in Startups with me again, my guy, Lon Harris. We've got two amazing guests today. We're going to get to them in a moment. We've got a roe.co wait bet that's coming at the end of the show with my brother Jamie and Lon and lots of news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
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**Jason Calacanis** (0:50)
First thing I want to get to is markets, Lon. We've had a lot of market activity.
Markets hit an all-time high, as many people know. But what has been surprising is after this hedge fund blew up, situational awareness, he had a lot of shorts on SaaS companies. Correct. And SaaS companies have been taken to the woodshed, right? We just saw Airtable get sold. I think we talked about that already on Wednesday's show.
But companies that have embraced AI and gone AI first have had a little bit of a turnaround here. And it's a mix bag. But if you look at, and I want to just go through three people who reported earnings, Airbnb, Figma and then Twilio.

**Lon Harris** (1:34)
Twilio.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:34)
Now, I own all of these, I believe. And I bought them all during like the COVID, right after COVID when I started J-Trading, I think in 2023 So I think I'm like massively up on all of them. But let's do this rapid fire. We'll get through these three important companies and what we can learn from them by their AI, embracing of AI or not.

**Lon Harris** (1:54)
All right. So we'll start off with design software, Figma, down about 77% from its high of $122, set shortly after last year's public offering. It's at about $23.81 right now. Co-founder and CEO, Dylan Fields, actually given up around $46 million in stock awards, which he was set to receive back in July, in hopes of boosting investor confidence. Here's his quote, Delusion is something that I feel just like our shareholders feel, given that this is an investment period right now. That felt like the thing that made sense to do.
For his part, Field posted on X that he thinks things are going generally well. He points to $370 million in revenue in Q2, 48% year-over-year revenue growth rate. It's their third straight quarter, Jason, of accelerated growth for Figma. You just bought in a big J trade on Figma only about a month ago after getting into a discussion about the health of the company with Dillon Field on X.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:49)
Yeah, what did I get in? What is the price I got in? So I got in at $22. So I'm basically at par right now. I bought 4,500 shares. And when I see a founder being a little bit chippy, a little bit with something to prove, and founder-led companies, especially when they're public, they have founder-led authority. For Figma, him giving up a huge stock ramp brings up a bigger issue, which is stock-based compensation. And a lot of companies, Lon, have gotten into giving huge amounts of stock-based compensation a year, 1%, 2%, 3%. If you're a shareholder, and the company's not doing well, and the management team is giving out 1%, 2%, 3% of the company every year, I think Snap was kind of in this with a lot of stock-based comp going on, and they don't put it into their books. So you don't take it as an expense. They kind of put it off the books, and this has made sophisticated investors, Bill Gurley talks about it a lot, but it's a tough thing to bring up, because you want people to be incented by stock, but if the company's not doing well, and you're taking out 1% or 2% or 3% of the company every year, you're diluting over five years, 15%, 20% of the company, while the stock is sideways, that gets people's Irish up. And then shareholders are like, I don't want to be involved in this company, because they're just taking and taking and not performing. So I think what Dylan did here with Figma is saying, hey, I'm not going to take, I think it's like a $50 million grant. He probably owns 20%, 30% of the company. I'm taking a guess here. That would be a high number for a publicly traded company. But what does he need another 50 million? He's already, if he owns 10% of the company even, he's got a billion plus. It's an $11 billion market cap company.