[dopeboy]

It's a worrying trend, especially for those of us in startup land. With the Figma deal following through and less companies going public, the assembly line funding model is showing some serious cracks.

Hope it's just temporary.

[paxys]

The entire model of startups taking on lots of VC funding, burning it over a few years to acquire customers and then having a big exit, all without bothering with a business plan or making a single dollar in profit, is basically over.

The reason VC funding is drying up, big unicorns aren't going public and acquisitions are halted is that investors are actually starting to drill into the numbers now, and finding nothing but hot air.

[dylan604]

I'm okay with this. Very little good has come from this. How many of the social platforms would be where they are now if they had to fund themselves differently?

[throwaway2037]

Real question: When will Stripe go public? That has to be the biggest unicorn in years. And barrier to entry is quite high, so they have built a nice moat. I wonder if the VCs push them to go public.

[no_wizard]

its only worrying if you can't make a sustainable standalone business at the end of the day.

Which should be the goal. A major acquisition should have always been seen as a last resort, only preferable to going out of business.

Startups hoping to cash out by selling to a competitor is its own kind of silliness in the first place and was largely fueled by lax regulation environments and 0% interest cash.

What ever happened to building durable businesses as an explicit goal

[dopeboy]

A lot of big businesses don't start off as sustainable ones. So they buy time, through venture capital, to become sustainable ones. This kind of news hurts the chances of that category of companies from being created.

[x0x0]

> With the Figma deal [falling] through

There's just no world in which the market leader ought to be able to buy their #1 competitor, particularly in a deal where the economics ($10b on $300m rev) only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. I have no idea what these folks were thinking.

[adventured]

The longer interest rates remain high, the more the pool gets drained of speculation.

The next up cycle in speculative behavior won't follow until after interest rates hit the floor again (inevitable).

[baq]

If you work at figma this… shouldn’t be a problem?

If you work at a temporarily-not-an-unicorn, no antimonopoly institutions care about you.

[eric-hu]

For the employees at Figma, their shot at cashing out evaporated when the Adobe deal was called off. I know people who were ready to leave Github in the past, but their manager told them to wait a bit, there’s a big acquisition coming and their equity would be worth sizeably more.

So here’s one of those scenarios: you’re working at Figma. Perhaps you’re burned out or just want to try out something different. This acquisition deal with Adobe has been signed and you’re grinding through the days waiting for your chance to cash in on the years of work with Figma that have nearly paid off. Then this happens.

This affects startups similarly. The non IPO exit path got that much less attractive.

[dopeboy]

Temporarily-not-an-unicorn companies will need to raise more money to become a unicorn. If those investors don't see light at the end of the tunnel, these companies get squeezed.

[itdoesnotmatter]

I hope not. I'd like to see people start building sustainable businesses intended to last and stop the whole cycle of accumulating users and hoping to get acquired before the funding runs out.

I think the ecosystem is healthier for Figma and Adobe remaining separate.