E96: Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO's recession warning, macro picture & more
Jason Calacanis (host), David Sacks (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), Narrator, David Friedberg (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), Narrator, Jason Calacanis (host)
In this episode of All-In Podcast, featuring Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, E96: Adobe acquires Figma for $20B, TPB SPAC, FedEx CEO's recession warning, macro picture & more explores adobe’s Figma bet, SaaS disruption, SPAC revival, and macro shocks The episode centers on Adobe’s $20B acquisition of Figma, dissecting the deal’s valuation, Figma’s exceptional SaaS growth metrics, and the strategic rationale for Adobe neutralizing a core innovator’s dilemma threat. The hosts contrast monolithic software vendors like Adobe with platform bundlers like Microsoft, exploring antitrust, competition, and how bundling can quietly crush category leaders. They then pivot to Friedberg’s new agriculture-focused SPAC merger in Brazil, using it to discuss food security, fertilizer, and the mounting global famine risk. The conversation closes with macro signals from FedEx’s recession warning, war-in-Ukraine geopolitical risk, inflation, rate hikes, and briefly, David Sacks’ Salvador Dalí film project and AI art exhibit.
Adobe’s Figma bet, SaaS disruption, SPAC revival, and macro shocks
The episode centers on Adobe’s $20B acquisition of Figma, dissecting the deal’s valuation, Figma’s exceptional SaaS growth metrics, and the strategic rationale for Adobe neutralizing a core innovator’s dilemma threat. The hosts contrast monolithic software vendors like Adobe with platform bundlers like Microsoft, exploring antitrust, competition, and how bundling can quietly crush category leaders. They then pivot to Friedberg’s new agriculture-focused SPAC merger in Brazil, using it to discuss food security, fertilizer, and the mounting global famine risk. The conversation closes with macro signals from FedEx’s recession warning, war-in-Ukraine geopolitical risk, inflation, rate hikes, and briefly, David Sacks’ Salvador Dalí film project and AI art exhibit.
Key Takeaways
Figma’s growth justifies a seemingly extreme multiple when you model forward ARR.
Despite paying ~50x current ARR, Adobe is arguably paying ~25x next year’s ARR and potentially mid-teens multiples on a near-term path to $1. ...
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Adobe is buying its way out of the innovator’s dilemma it couldn’t solve internally.
Figma’s web-native, multiplayer, bottom‑up freemium model threatened Adobe’s high-margin, single-player desktop franchise—something public-market expectations around free cash flow made difficult for Adobe to replicate organically.
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Platform bundlers like Microsoft can undercut best-of-breed SaaS products through bundling.
By cloning competitors (e. ...
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Founders should choose targets carefully: beating monoliths is easier than beating platforms.
The hosts advise entrepreneurs to attack companies like Adobe (few monolithic products, less bundling leverage) rather than integrated platforms like Microsoft, where distribution and pricing power make category entry far harder.
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Running acquired products independently requires preserving their own pricing and go‑to‑market.
If Adobe fully bundles Figma into Creative Cloud, it risks gutting Figma’s dedicated sales incentives and product feedback loop, repeating what happened to Yammer at Microsoft; true independence hinges on independent pricing and GTM.
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Agricultural retail channels are critical leverage points for deploying new ag technology.
Friedberg’s SPAC targets Lavoro, a leading Brazilian ag input retailer whose agronomists advise farmers; modern tech, services, and data analytics deployed via this channel can raise yields and calories produced without expanding land use.
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The Ukraine war and energy crisis are materially raising global famine risks despite some progress.
Even as some Ukrainian grain and fertilizer exports resume, high natural gas prices, fertilizer plant shutdowns, and disrupted planting cycles have pushed hundreds of millions back toward acute food insecurity, reversing 30 years of improvement.
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Notable Quotes
“This movement to the cloud or the movement to collaboration—monolithic products are just very much DOA.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya
“You cannot effectively compete, as it turns out, against Microsoft at any point product.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya
“Once Yammer was folded into the Office Suite and didn’t have its own independent pricing and its own independent sales team, it just disappeared.”
— David Sacks
“We may be retracing our way all the way back 30 years because of the crises… around Ukraine and the resulting impact on fertilizer availability and pricing.”
— David Friedberg
“If America is going to risk war with a nuclear armed power, there better be a vital interest at stake.”
— David Sacks
Questions Answered in This Episode
Is Adobe more likely to preserve Figma’s independent freemium model or eventually fold it tightly into Creative Cloud, and how would each path impact Figma’s innovation pace?
The episode centers on Adobe’s $20B acquisition of Figma, dissecting the deal’s valuation, Figma’s exceptional SaaS growth metrics, and the strategic rationale for Adobe neutralizing a core innovator’s dilemma threat. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what point do Microsoft-style bundling tactics cross the line from savvy strategy into behavior that antitrust regulators should actively constrain?
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How can founders practically decide whether to build against a monolithic incumbent (like Adobe) versus a platform bundler (like Microsoft or Google) when choosing markets?
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What specific ag-tech interventions deployed through retailers like Lavoro could most quickly improve yields and resilience in regions now at highest famine risk?
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Given the intertwined pressures of inflation, rate hikes, FedEx’s recession warning, and the Ukraine war, what scenarios should investors and operators realistically prepare for over the next 12–24 months?
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Transcript Preview
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, so-
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All right, listen, it-
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(laughs)
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Jake Hall said he's being brigaded by MAGA. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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What's going on? Let your winners ride. Rain man David Sachs. What's going on? And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of quinoa. What's going on?
All right, everybody. Welcome to episode 96 of The All In podcast. We had a bomb drop just yesterday, uh, with Adobe agreeing to acquire Figma, uh, 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, uh, I believe in history. This company, if you don't know, it helps you design web apps, uh, 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, the company is just a juggernaut. If you work in startups, you get Figma designs all day, uh, and Adobe stock got crushed because of this, so it's down as much as 18% on Thursday. Uh, Figma's most recent valuation was $10 billion in June of 2021, their Series E, so peak market, they had raised $200 million at that time. There's a lot of details to get into here, but, uh, you know, listen, let's, uh, ask the sultan of SaaS here what you think of this, because it's double what was an incredible, uh, 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? Uh, wh- how do we reconcile this, Sachs?
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