In the example here: people would bet by either buying $100 worth of Figma shares, or they could buy $50 worth of put options and give $50 to the developers of Penpot.
Would something like that be legal or does it violate any type of trading regulations?
(I do not recommend this)
I would love to be a reverse—VC
Should I make a mock system, see how many people would be willing to sign up and make a pledge to their favorite projects?
Is this an IPO where participants (public) will make long term money of it’s already at the top and this is the final stage of “finding someone to hold the bag” and in this case eventually — the public i.e the retail trader, mostly?
Seriously, are people starting to replace Figma with just basic LLM or simpler LLM-based solutions? I'm just trying to understand the timing of the IPO and the market. We used to use Figma, but dropped it as first phases of product design loop ended. Basic LLM does not feel there yet, but it does feel like it could be there very quickly.
If the companies are so confident of their trading ability then they should stop their existing business and become trading companies.
With all the AI tools, the market is in a transition period.
Those transitions are crucial for a product's success or failure. For example, the transition from web to mobile with the iPhone, along with the growing pains of using Photoshop and Illustrator for mockups, opened the door to Sketch. Then, the evolution of web apps, like Google Docs, opened the door to Figma (while other products like InVision had a drastic fall). What they accomplished in a web app is an impressive engineering feat, so they have an excellent engineering team.
The good: Figma is implementing multiple product updates to capitalize on the "AI wave". The Figma Make in beta is very similar to Vercel's v0 (and others). Still, the tight integration with Figma could help them leverage their current subscriptions and attract designers, PMs, and developers. Recently, they released an MCP server in beta that enables AI coding tools to obtain information from designs. While many designers may disagree with me, I believe that at least they are trying to maintain a leading position in a rapidly shifting market.
The bad: They are diversifying their product offering too much, trying to compete on many fronts. Figma Site competes with Framer and Webflow, and Figma Buzz aims at digital marketing, which is usually covered by many tools (including Canva). Figma Slides is ideal for designers who use Figma daily, but it may not be as user-friendly for those transitioning from PowerPoint or Keynote. They switched the focus from the Design->Dev process that made them successful. The dev mode still doesn't resolve many issues, such as versioning, and the variable features seem half-baked; component handling needs more love, and the prototyping options are still limited.
The future... is hard to tell. In terms of UI design tools, they are the leaders. Penpot is far from being stable; Sketch is similar, but their web experience is not as good as Figma. Unless a new player enters the market, their biggest threat is a significant disruption caused by AI tools... but the tools I've seen so far are not different from Figma Make.
Now prepare for price increases, lock-ins and many threads of people looking for Figma alternatives.
The ones cheering already have stock ready to dump it on the public markets on retail.