Weekly Recap: Figma’s IPO, Ramp Reaches $22.5B, Gwyneth Paltrow Saves Astronomer, Top AI Researchers Ranked

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Astronomer is back. Astronomer had Ramp on the website. Apparently Ramp's a happy customer.

Never lost faith.

Never lost faith. Yeah. So Astronomer, if you weren't following, if you were living under a rock. Apache Airflow as a Service, Managed Enterprise, SaaS platform on top of Apache Airflow for data analytics, streaming data, that type of stuff. And they had absolutely chaotic week last week with their CEO because being caught at a Coldplay concert. Was that last week or the week before?

I think it was maybe the week before. The week before. Had to have been.

The CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. Chris Martin called him out on stage and said, oh, those people look like they have an affair.

Did he actually say that live?

He did say that on the video.

No way.

So they're panning around to the different kiss cams or different just cameras, and they spot the CEO of Astronomer hugging the head of hr. Can't even hug your employees anymore, apparently.

Can'T even give your chief people officers or a hug in this country anymore.

At a romantic concert. Once they see themselves on the screen at the show, they recoil in horror and turn around and. And the other person in HR who's sitting next to them is like, oh, my God, what's going on?

Well, that's.

What I didn't understand was that. Actually, apparently that was.

People went and dug it up and found out that she works there too.

I thought that was people just saying, hey, this person looks like this person. Oh, I don't know. It seems wild that the HR department was hitting the concert with the CEO.

It was like, maybe it was an open secret.

I don't know. Yeah.

Anyway, it did not. It was not good for Astronomer. We were discussing this. Lulu was saying the CEOs got to go because he's a hired gun, not a founder. And it just displays very bad character and it reflects poorly on the company. We were kind of going back and forth on this about the idea of, like, okay, yeah, like, the CEO did something bad in his personal life, but, like, do you really want to find an alternative to your managed Apache Airflow service? Like, it's kind of a hassle to rip that out if you're happy with.

We said that not a product company would be fine. They did need a new CEO immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete.

Yes.

Stepped up within days. Pete DeJoy.

Oh, wait, so the founders back in the CEO?

That's a real bull case for Soundboard.

For the Ashton hall sound effect. I want to hear Some good news.

Astronomer is now founder mode. Everybody.

Astronomers is totally in founder mode.

They were already delivering the world's data.

Yes.

And now they're in founder mode.

They're in founder mode. I think they're unsurprising. Another billion dollars for Bain Capital. Let's hear it for Bain Capital. They don't get an index. An index. Nice. I didn't know that anyone so.

And I actually I emailed briefly with Pete Dejoy and he said he's a fan of the show.

Amazing.

We're hoping to get him on. We don't want to actually talk about any of this stuff. I want to talk about.

I'm so into Apache Airflow now. I'm so ready.

But anyways, so late Friday night the Astronomer clearly they didn't want.

They didn't want us to react to this on stream so they put it up after we. After we logged.

Let's pull up the video.

I want to watch the full thing.

Thank you for your interest in astronomy. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days. They wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow. Unifying the experience of running data ML and AI pipelines that scale scale. We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we received, yes there is still room available at our beyond analytics event in September. We will now be returning to game changing results.

Is Chris Martin's ex wife.

Yes.

Thank you for your interest.

Entire thing.

It's very funny. It's. It's not really like Chris. It's not like getting back at Chris Martin in any sort of weird way. It's just funny that it's like another voice from that universe.

Yeah, that's so they. They remain close friends, co parents in so many ways. Like she's like the best spokesperson for this because anyways, you know, remarkable how.

Quickly they shot that. You know they had to like. Yeah probably like a conference room near her office or like her house or something.

Yeah, it's a perfect response. We will don't need Astronomer at all.

Six lines.

It's really, really ties into the story. It made sense. It wasn't just some random celebrity. It had some funny tie in. Yep.

Yep.

And I think it was incredibly well done. Lulu broke it down. She said laughing at themselves was the Right move. Because humor does four crucial things. Connects with a new audience. Even for people who don't care about Apache Airflow. Being in on the joke together forms a connection with Astronomer. Diffused tension by joining the ridicule. Ridicule. They're no longer its subject or its object. Get closure. They said it out loud. The joke is tapped. Everyone can move on. Signal a fresh start. The CEO and HR lady are gone. It's a new management team. And making light of this shows they've consciously uncoupled from the past. Great breakdown.

Very well written, Lulu. The third point is so funny because there's a little bit about nothing will kill a joke. Independent of all the crazy Astronomer Chris Martin Coldplay thing. There's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a Series D Enterprise SaaS company making the joke. And so if they're making, if they're jumping in on the joke, it's like, well, we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop and so we jumped in, we're playing along and we got the last, literally the last laugh. Like, like if anyone tried to post something about Astronomer CEO Coldplay like they would immediately be everyone be like, yeah, we've moved on.

The real question is, is the IPO windows open? Should they go public right now meme stock and actually have Gwyneth step in like kind of like chairman type role, you know, really expand the. Not just comps.

They need a Treasury. They do, but they need something that speaks to the history of the company. They need to buy some funny asset to put on the balance sheet. I was thinking about we've moved on from Bitcoin treasuries to like the further out risk curve ones.

Well there's all the Ethereum Treasuries, Gamestop.

Treasury, which is hilarious. I think the next generation is just straight up lottery ticket Treasury. Just scratchers.

I thought you were going to say like they should put some like match group on the balance.

They should. That would be good. That would be more like tied to this and I think that makes sense for Astronomer. Get a bunch of match group. Get a bunch of match group stock on your balance.

By the way, we're.

Or like Eventbrite maybe or who runs like the Coldplay concerts. It's like didn't Taylor Swift like sue them Ticketmaster. Get some Ticketmaster stock on the balance sheet. You know, who knows?

That would tie really like the values of the company.

Exactly.

And also some potential.

Yeah. What was that company? There was that biotherapy company that was saying like we're fighting financial fraud by buying GameStop stuff. Yeah, financial inefficiencies. But yeah, get some scratch market manipulation. Get some scratchers on the balance sheet for sure. Get some lottery tickets. Everyone's like, yeah, they have $50,000 in lottery tickets, but if it hits, this could be $500 million on the balance sheet.

Yeah, it is such a. I think a year from now we'll look back and say like they found a way to actually turn this into a win. Oh yeah, totally. Now some people, if you know, this is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen in this decade for sure. But I think if you, you now have a million millions of people that like have think your company is kind of like cool and funny and they're aware of it. They're aware of it and would have cost them. It would have cost them. I'm sure this Gwyneth video cost millions of dollars. I think it probably would have cost them to try to, to try to build that type of brand recognition. Otherwise like just, just traditionally would have cost multiples of that.

I only have one note on the video. I mean Autism Capital here says you have to give credit where credit is due. This is 10 out of 10 PR recovery. I think it loses one point because it was hard posted and not restreamed one livestream 30 destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. They should have restreamed it. Anyway, fantastic comeback. Lulu says next move is for an Astronomer competitor to hire Chris Martin to do a video on how their product is the best at helping you gain visibility in any environment and, and keep your private networking secure. And somebody in the comments says the chain is going to end with Brad.

This is the thing. I don't even know who Astronomers competitors are.

Don't know who their competitors are, but I don't know, maybe they should.

That's why this is a win for Astronomer.

It's a huge win for Astronomer. And yeah, I mean also interesting because this kind of plays into what we were talking about with Paul from Browser base. This idea of Apache Airflow is open source. You would expect that managed Airflow would be something that's totally in AWS's wheelhouse. And yet they were able to scale to a series D company. 300 employees clearly doing well and now they have this breakout moment and they still are probably facing fierce competition from the hyperscalers and from the big cloud platforms, but they just don't.

The timing of this is so insane. Bain led the Series D. It was announced on May 1st.

Let's go.

So, so love it. Just very recently here, I mean they've been putting up some incredible numbers.

Let's get Mitt Romney on the show, have him talk about it.

The last fiscal year, astronomers saw 150% year over year ARR growth world class, 130% net revenue retention and 90% product utilization with customers. So that's huge. I mean I think they're gonna have a massive end to the year.

Speaking of high NPS products, let's tell you about figma.com, think bigger, build faster. FIGMA helps design and development teams build great products. You can get started for free@figma.com and.

We will be in the great city of New York this week.

Yeah.

For the FIGMA ipo. Be live from Nicee, the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

That's what the cool kids call it.

Nice e Nicee.

I always just call it NYSE or like the New York Stock Exchange. But when you're saying it every other word because you're in that world, when you're big in that world, you're big in that world.

When you're taking companies public like every other week.

Exactly, exactly. You got it.

You gotta use slang.

You got it.

Yeah.

What the cool kids use. Okay. Bull or bear case for figma, I go to FIGMA make and I tell it build me a collaborative design tool.

Don't make mistakes.

Don't make mistakes. Recursive the snake eating its tail. You use FIGMA to make figma, then you don't need FIGMA anymore. Is that a bear case? What's going on here?

Well, I feel like it'd be so powerful. Basically still paying FIGMA to host.

Okay. Okay. So they get you to host it. Okay. That's how they get you locked in.

You're paying.

So they get you paying one way or another. Yeah. I like that though. It's a, it's an extension. It's an existential risk for all these platforms that allow you to build software. Vibe.

That's why every SaaS.

First thing I want to Vibe code is a vibe coding platform.

Well, yeah, every. That's why every SaaS company has to have a Vibe coding product now.

Yes. So you can Vibe code the product itself.

Yeah.

Yes. The, the, the tautological vibe code.

No, that is, I mean so the question people have been saying like, okay, at some point in the future you'll be able to one shot products.

Yep.

And I, I would say I have really strong conviction that in the next few years you'll be able to one shot a design tool.

Yep.

Will you be able to one shot a design tool for that works in the enterprise. That work has like that people. When you think you're with Figma has been like shipping features every single day for a decade now. Yep. And, and even if you knew exactly which features mattered and how they all work together, it would be very difficult to create a one to one clone.

And then also there's the network of if you hire a designer and you're.

Like, hey, I need you to use my Vibe.

Use my Vive coded Figma knockoff that I vive coded in.

Can you just pay? Can we just use 20 bucks a month?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then. Yeah. So the ecosystem is very important and.

Also there's a whole app ecosystem.

Exactly.

It makes me, you know, it definitely makes me more bullish on companies that have these like developer app ecosystems.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean Shopify is the same way. You can one. Maybe you could one shot like an E commerce storefront product. But can you. Are you then going to one shot the downstream.

I mean as soon as, as soon as LLMs were writing code and we were talking about like AGI takeoff and super intelligence, I had this like running thought about, okay, so at a certain point you can go to an LLM or a Vibe coding platform and say like, build me an E commerce website. And it will just say like, okay, setting up Shopify. But in the far, far future it could just say, okay, applying for a banking license, applying for a money transfer license. I'm going to rebuild Stripe. I'm going to rebuild Shopify. I'm going to rebuild a database from first principles. I'm going to use just raw, actually.

Just going to make a data center.

I'm going to make, I'm going to build.

If I want to build an Internet company, I should have at least one data center.

And it all just does that in one prompt. Because one prompt fires off. I mean how many man hours have gone into building Stripe or building any of these companies? It's like, you know, tens of thousands of employees for most of them for, you know, decades. You add all that together. But if the LLM can do that and if the AI system can do that in the data center in just a few minutes in hyper compression, who knows? Maybe Logan Bartlett has another take on the Astronomer video. He says the Astronomer video is great on its own, but I'm even more impressed the leadership team and the board were able to come to consensus to make this investment and take this risk. Absent the CEO they've had for two years, for the last two years, I can't imagine everyone was on board with this initially. So major kudos to everyone. Getting there eventually and taking this chance. This bodes well for their future, imo. And I agree. Like, even with Gwyneth Paltrow, it feels so funny. But like there's this idea of like let's, let's put out not a standard legal statement is feels risky and it's so easy for someone to step up and say, hey, like let's not take this risk. It's not worth it.

Well, they put out the quick statement that Pete was stepping back into the.

Yeah, they had put out a few statements but clearly something. Something was was clicking.

Question is, what should. What should Andy Byron, the CEO having the affair, which, I mean that's the.

Best part about this video is that it doesn't take shots at him.

Yeah, it doesn't.

It doesn't. It doesn't punch down. It doesn't make it like, oh, it doesn't drag that in. It doesn't make it more complicated. And a lot of times when, when CEOs do get pushed out, there's like lawsuits about comp. And was it fair to release people? And so there's like all these things that can come back. Like if you are, especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, you should be, you should probably not be talking about that see that CEO, because if you come out and say they were not good and that's why I had to step back in, then that could hurt their career prospects and then they could sue you for defamation or something like that. So there's a lot of risk to anything around that. All the corporate comms like, it is like the lawyers are like annoying but like they do make a good point that like there is financial impact if you get it wrong. So very, very good. And then stays a says, I think we're going to find out that Chris Martin felt bad, asked Gwyneth Paltrow to help out and they gave Astronomer an offer to do damage control. My guess is that this is entertainment industry magic happening, not data tech magic.

Logan says Chris Martin wants to. Wants CEOs who are having affairs to feel welcome at his romantic concerts. He's like, this could be really bad for business. This could be bad for ticket sales. I have to go into damage control.

I don't think Chris Mart friends behind this. This is a ridiculous Theory, stay sassy or whatever Logan says, totally possible.

No, I do. I think there could be some. I think there could be something here.

I mean, I don't think so.

I don't know.

He feels bad that this just happened at his show.

Chris Martin has the data. He might be like, 10% of people at my concerts are having affairs.

You think he's storing it in Apache Airflow?

Or. Yeah, maybe. Maybe he just really.

All of his ticket sales are going through Apache Airflow and he's monitoring it using Astronomer. He's just like, no, my bags. I love this company. He's like, actually accidentally an investor as well, through some fund. Maybe he's Bain Capital lp. Who knows? He might be at that level. He might be heavily anchored gp, anchor LP in index. And to close out, Lulu said, for everyone asking me, this wasn't me. I do not work with Astronomer, but I think it was very well done. Kudos to their team. And it says a lot about Lulu's brand that whenever good PR happens, people are like, lulu's has to be behind this. It can only be her.

It can't possibly scream Lulu.

It did. It did. It did scream Lulu.

I didn't. I didn't. I didn't ask her because I didn't want to know. Because, like, I just like, you know.

You like the mystery.

I like the mystery of it. I feel like if I knew, I should probably say something.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, let's shift gears. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance. Manage risk, Improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Cheers to Vanta.

In the other side of PR statements, the TAPP hack is an absolute disaster. This is.

And their statement was a disaster.

Their statement was a disaster. It does not seem.

Somebody just informed me, please, a friend of the show, that it was Ryan Reynolds Agency that pulled it off.

No way.

Which makes total sense.

Yeah.

Ryan Reynolds, the bridge between tech, Hollywood, Hollywood tech.

Oh, he's master. Master of his craft. And I feel like he's done a number of those, like, solo directions.

So there's an article. Ryan Reynolds Maximum Effort Ad Agency turned Astronomy's viral moment into marketing gold.

Wow.

The production company was involved with the latest Astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow. The ad is being hailed as a master class in crisis pr.

I agree.

Astronomer Fortune is saying Astronomer got the last laugh.

They did. They really did.

Releasing it late on a Friday too is great. Shutting down the work week, well, you.

Don'T want AWS to trade down too heavily on the news. You know, if you release that during market hours, it could be turmoil, could trigger an entire market sell off. And last week we had five back to back all time highs in the S&P 500. That's why we wearing white suits.

And we're wearing white suits because we have peace with Europe.

Peace with Europe. We created a list of top AI researchers. It's called the Metis list and it's available, it's live now@metislist.com these are the top AI researchers. We're of course experts in AI and AI researchers. So we are fully qualified to curate this list. But we did have some help from friends and we pulled some data. We looked at.

It was interesting. The top many of the people that we asked to do kind of like an ELO style ranking did not want to be named because nobody wants to be picking favorites on the inside. But I think we put together a great list. It's honestly some of the most impressive. There's people in the top 10 with no Dwarkesh appearances.

I don't know how that happens. It's crazy.

How did they do it?

You got to get on Dwarkesh. Yeah, we tried to have some fun with this. We pulled some Google citations, some Google research citations, looked at some of their previous companies. This was of course based on the list which apparently has been going around Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg has been using this to recruit top AI researchers. We've been following the trade war. As Jordi put it earlier, we should.

Have put a buy it now price on here for Zuck. So you could just add to cart.

Add to cart? Yeah, Just create the superintelligence team directly on metislist.com maybe that's how we monetize this thing.

Yeah. It was good to see Alan Turing make the list.

Fantastic. Yeah. Underrated. George Boole, not doing so well. Inventor of Boolean logic, but he didn't make the list. But I think he's sitting in the 80s, not doing too well. Tyler, tell us more about the list. What do you think stands out? What'd you learn from the process? What was your methodology? How'd you build this thing?

Yes, this is a lot of fun. I scraped most of Google Scholar, like the top 5,000 people maybe. And then with some friends from the big labs, I kind of narrowed it down. You can see like a lot of the papers they've written, interest, stuff like that. I think another gem in there is Alan Turing. He's doing pretty well right now. He's. Let's see, he's ranked number six.

Yeah, people love touring. I mean, we passed his test. And how long did his test stand? What, 60, 80 years? Not bad. Yeah, something like that's longer than most benchmarks in evals.

Alan Turing versus Goalpost.

Yeah. Wait, what were you about to say?

Yeah, I mean, it's the longest enduring benchmark, I think, for sure.

80 years. Yeah. But who knows? RKGI V3 might be around for 80 years. We might be hearing I beat in 20 in 2034 or something. Wait, no, 2120, I guess would be like the, the Alan Turing test benchmark. We got John Shulman. Who else? Jurgen Schmid Hubers on here. Jeff Dean, one of the greatest to ever do it over at Google. He's been at Google for a long time. Still no.

Yes.

A Dwarkesh appearance. Let's go, let's go. That's good. Built MapReduce, BigTable, TensorFlow, Yann LeCun's in here. You got all the different countries, really wide representation. Canada, uk, Australia, Russia, China. There's all sorts of people from all over coming together. A couple people without photos have been able to stay anonymous, but most people, we got their photo. Sholto Douglas. Good to see him on here. So this should be fun. Well, I'm sure we'll get a lot of feedback. Oh, dwar Sholto, ranked 56, but three Dwarkesh appearances.

There we go. How are you? Were you waiting? Were you waiting Podcast appearances properly, Tyler.

You should be at the top putting up numbers like that. For sure. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. He's gonna be coming for Elia's spot.

Yeah. So this is a lot of fun. There's a, there's an email sign up. You can, you can drop your email at the top to learn about the next. Drop whatever we send out.

That's right.

Whenever we, whenever we go live with stuff, we will let you know first.

And we're getting big into email soon, by the way. Stay tuned for that.

Very excited about that. And yeah, hopefully this speeds up our trading card generation because you'll just be able to screenshot this and say, this person's just got traded because it's moving fast and furious and we can't spend that much time handcrafting each of those trade deal trading card images too quickly. Indeed, indeed. There's a lot of stuff going on. Well, interesting. Related to Zuck. Did you know that one of the kids at the IMO that was competing against OpenAI and DeepMind was named Alexander Wang.

Wow.

Great nominative determinism. Yeah, Future Alex.

Great future.

And speaking of Iowa. Yeah.

People are calling him the Alex. Alex Wayne. Next in line.

He does have an E. It's not a L X, E, N, D E. It's D E R instead of D R. So slightly different, but still Alex Wang nonetheless.

Welcome to the show, our humble New York temple of technology.

Yeah, give us the update. What's the news today? Break it down.

Great jacket, by the way. You got little touches of yellow in there.

It's not, it's not yellow enough for my taste, but there is a little bit of yellow.

By the way, our tailor designed these to celebrate and, and really symbolize saving time and money. And so I think they did the job. I think they did the job. We'll get you.

We'll get you.

We'll get you one too.

We got to do this.

We got to go. Man on the street in like Times Square. What do you do for a living? What business do you run? Do you want to save time and money? Let's get you on Ramp right now. We'll introduce you to CEO ramp.com. yeah, but break it down for us. What happened today?

Yeah, well, first, I mean, we might need a bigger gong.

I know. We don't know at all.

You have no idea. We're going to the ends of America to get an American made gong and we're looking for something that will actually be floor to ceiling. It'll be. Be something like 20 by 20. So working on that. I look forward to hitting it for the next one, the Series E3.

Yeah, yeah. Break it down.

This is phenomenal, guys. Thanks for being here. Here in New York, the capital of capital.

Yes, it is.

It really is technology here at TVPN. No, it's. We raised $500 million at a 22 and a half billion dollar valuation.

There we go. There we go.

Has a nice ring to it.

I really appreciate all the. And I'm losing track, but it seems like Ramp has not been able to get a fundraise public without it leaking, you know. Five days previously to the press, but this is official. I'm glad to make it official here.

It is official. It's the right valuation. And look, early on in my career I got this advice that the biggest battle a startup faces is people not giving a shit, people not caring. And so you know what, we're happy that people care, even if things come out a couple days before. But we feel super lucky. And so that's the big news of the day. But I think so much what we focused on today, especially in the raise, is what we're going to do with the capital between the last raise, which we were proud to hit the gong.

For here six weeks ago.

Six weeks ago, some of it actually came from, actually from the product. We launched our first AI agent for controllers and the data was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

Interesting. So that catalyzed this 100%. Yeah, yeah, that's my big question. Like, why E2, why not F? And then also it feels like you're like the king of like a bunch of fundraisers in a short amount of time. There's clearly some benefits to that. But why not?

I got to give some credit to the business, John. I mean, Eric's, Eric's a great CEO, but the business is really, you know.

Well, we haven't talked about this before. Like, we'll share it. Like right now, July is pacing. We're pacing to do 20% more purchase volume in July than June. Like it's, it's been one month. Like, like the business is growing extraordinarily quickly.

What's that meme with the guy on Hot Ones where he's, no, no, guys, don't, don't talk.

We need, it's have Celsius.

But no, no, no, that's insane. The business itself is, I remember, I'm sure in, back in 2020 you'd be happily sending, you know, investors like, you know, we grew 20% month over month, you know, but on like, you know, whatever 1% of the scale. Yeah, so, so really wild.

Yeah, I, I, I, I guess like the bigger like meta question is just like, like there is a world where you stack a bunch of these wins into the mega deck and then just do like one massive fundraise every 18 months. There's this meme of like, fundraising is a distraction. The CEO should be out there working with customers, improving the product. Obviously you're doing that, but how do you, how do you do these back to back fundraisers without them being distracting? I know you have a big team now, but like what goes into the decision to do like, I don't know if they're even smaller, but just like more frequent fundraisers because that feels like something that's unique to your company.

Yeah, for sure. So one, it's sort of a funny thing, but people, I actually didn't understand this before in the startup world, like what is a series A or a B or an E2, really?

Somebody who did a 55 million dollar seed round.

Yeah.

And then, and then you'll.

And we pressed them, we were like, is this for marketing? Like, yeah, you know, you're still gonna get the expect, like the expectation will be that you perform at like the series B level.

Based on that company, it's gonna feel like a series B company.

Like, I almost think like calling things by letters is totally silly. All it actually meant was we had a set of documents that we use whenever financing happened. There's hundreds of pages of documents that go back and forth between company and investor.

Yeah.

Calling it an E2 just meant that we use the exact same documents.

Save time and money.

Save money on lawyers. No, it was really just that. And so look was very efficient to get the financing done. I also believe a lot in this concept of marking to market. Yeah, totally of in real time, what are companies ultimately worth? And you know, when you look at the fundraise from about a month, month and a half ago, I think is when it was announced, done earlier, you know, we raised, I think in Exchange for about $200 million, approximately 1% more shares came onto the capital. So it was a very small amount of dilution. With this raise of 500 million at 22 and a half, it's like 2 ish percent. See, these are not that dilutive.

Yeah, it's reflected restructuring the company. But, but, but it's giving you a more modern mark.

Adding to the war chest.

Adding to the war chest. And I think it's a good thing because one, you know, allows people to invest at the right point in time. But two, because you're, you're not raising far ahead of where metrics are. It means that the company's not that distracted, you know, for, for the actual organization. Like we've just been obsessed with going, yeah, and you're not in a position.

Where everyone's like, oh, like at this valuation, like Ramp doesn't just need an Act 2, but they need an Act 3, 4 and 5. Like they gotta, you know, create super intelligence and all this crazy stuff because like, like it's like based on the actual progress of the company.

100%. Right.

Makes sense. I want to talk about the product. I want to talk about the AI agent thing. The interesting. My experience with Ramp was that it was in many ways an AI agent before AI agents was a buzzword. And I know that obviously when you scan a receipt, it goes through an OCR process and the data, the text is extracted from the image. And then I, I would assume that you were an early adopter of LLMs to help clean that up. And that was in many ways a more like a super magical AI agent experience. But I'm not prompting it. It's just something that's happening in the background. It's invisible. And you're using some, you know, deterministic code, some probably probabilistic code, some older machine learning algorithms for ocr, some newer lms to clean up the data and tag things and say, this is a restaurant, that's a flight and you know, do all the magic that helps categorize expenses. The question is like, it feels like a big shift to put the, the, the, the, the agent in the hands of the user. And so you said that you're seeing like incredible adoption. What are people actually using for? What's the feedback? And I mean, like, yeah, what else are the learnings of like, where that goes? Do people want that or do people ultimately want to be able to prompt a few times and then have things baked into the core behind the scenes workflows?

Yeah. So I feel like, so let's talk a little bit. Like, what are like AI assistants? What are AI agents? What's the distinction? Because I actually think people are like pretty, pretty sloppy with the two. And so I feel like, to be.

Clear, if you want to raise money right now, you just build SaaS and call it an agent. Boom.

But let's talk. We have a lot of people who are building, who are listening to this podcast. So I think first for assistants or co pilots, the idea is a person prompts, the copilot, will review it, will make a recommendation, but then ultimately it's on the human to go do the work. I get a recommendation, I input it back and forth. This is maybe similar to experience that you might have on a chat sheet or that kind of a thing. An agent is a bit different. What you do is you give it instructions and access to tools. And you say under certain conditions, if you see an outcome that I've instructed you to drive, just go do it. Right.

Forever, essentially forever.

And you know, I'm going to modify things from time to time. But it's a little bit more similar to like, let's say you hire an intern or a new hire, you teach them how to do the job, you watch a bunch of times and then they go on and you periodically check the work. And so that's a bit of the distinction and one of the. If you think about what we're actually optimizing for one of the core metrics is we look at what was the amount of work that a ramp customer was able to do in a single, let's say in an hour or in a minute. And so as we look over the years, that's gone up a lot. And if you joined in 2023, mathematically we can show that you are categorizing three times more transactions, pulling in three times as many receipts, whatever the metric is, as you did just two years ago for every minute you're spending on the site. So it's all to say like every minute is counting for three times more. I think that ratio should be 30 times more. And if you look at what happened. So we launched, we made this announcement about three, four weeks ago for this first AI agent and we had early adopters notion webflow Quora. The stats just absolutely shocked us when we looked at this. Functionally, these companies were able to get 15 times more work done, transactions categorized. But the more interesting part is these agents were way more accurate. These agents all day, they know the expense policy better than any manager at the company. And so it was 99% accurate. It got a lot more tasks done. And suddenly for many people who've worked at large companies, you spend like an hour just reviewing expenses and you're like, why am I spending an hour reviewing someone's Uber or their purchase? And that's just gone. And you're focusing on actually interesting exceptions. And so where I think this kind of adds up to is for a lot of years people had to be forced to like, learn how does software work? And how do I think like software? How do I learn to use Salesforce? How do I learn to use Google, how do I learn to use Excel? Now we're teaching these software programs to think like people. And that means you can teach software functionally the same way you would an intern to go and figure out what expenses are in and out of policy. And that very avid software that doesn't take breaks, doesn't take holidays, that is obsessed over every deal your expense policy can catch.

When your policy online, if you, if you need to talk to it at, you're on a, on a work trip and you need a. Yeah. Or yeah, therapy. But I was going to say like you don't. If you can avoid messaging somebody on the weekend to ask if something's in or out of policy, it's like it benefits everybody.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. No, and I think you bring up like another, another point of like a lot of work is sort of if this and that, like if you get a, if you get a, you want to buy a new piece of software and that vendor sends you like a quote, then procurement negotiates it. Once procurements negotiate it, then legal takes a look at it. Once legal says it's fine, then you know, finances is there an invoice and we go and pay it out and then it goes into accounting. But if you have lots of digital agents, functionally all the time, online and responsive, these things can occur simultaneously. And so it means actually instead of waiting days to go and onboard a new vendor, it can be done in minutes. And so it just means it's much easier to do work. And I think the big picture of like why are we here at all, it's actually just to save time and money to make it easier for more companies to operate. And that's what this stuff adds up to.

It's really nice when you don't have to update your mission statement. I know as new technology. I mean we've talked about Google's original mission statement which is loosely organize and make the world's information valuable. And it's like okay, well generative AI does that very efficiently. Agentic workflows applied to finance saves people time and money. It's the same mission.

I want to take a post about a post from Keith Raboy. He said five out of six board meetings he had in the last couple months were about how to design a company's organization for AI. I'm interested in and we've been debating this in the context of meta superintelligence. Is artificial intelligence an app like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or is it like their finance team, like their infrastructure team, like their database team, that that's across all of the apps as like a service layer. And I'm interested to know like you have a product now and I imagine that there is a team that is working on building that product and that product has AI in the name. But then I imagine that every single person from designers to engineers to, you know, the ops people are using artificial intelligence in their day to day. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a new like cross functional team develop or how you're thinking through that, that trade off of like horizontal versus vertical, maybe both teams in just terms of running a high performance organization.

I love his post and I think it's actually like, I'll put it this way, like I don't think most people have really come to terms with the reality that like computers can like see and hear and like think now. It's so different. And like, if you're, like, just going and repeating the same organizational structure that, like, was in place when anything were possible, like, it's a little bit of like, are you. Are you awake? Like, like, this actually is the right question. And one, I think people should be spending a lot more time in, you know, in earnest.

We need more business. We need some new business, you know, management textbooks. It's true, for sure. It's a joke, but there's no. There's no, like, enduring.

And so if you don't. If you have a whole piece of your org chart that doesn't have any AI on it, like, you're going to ship that in the product, and then people are going to be like, wait, this part, this piece of the product feels very manual and like web 1.0 almost.

Yeah, the crazy, I mean, one. One thing that happened yesterday was Zuck saying, like, basically saying you can now use code AI in your coding interviews, which sounds insane. Like, wouldn't you want to still hire for people that might just naturally be good at engineering and then get better? But he's basically making the statement of, no, we're so committed to this new paradigm that you should use every tool you have available to do the best possible work.

I think it's totally right. And I'll admit something, even for people who are interviewing soon, there are some job functions at Ramp where it is actually not possible to pass an interview or a coding interview without using an LLM. And that's intentional. It's actually intentional to figure out, like, are you curious about that? Are you using these tools or not? It's not a question of iq. I think there's brilliant people who, you know, don't need an LLM to think. But I think that the capabilities of being able to access an extraordinary amount of compute as well as specialized, you know, knowledge. Why wouldn't you?

Yeah, it's like, just because Scott Wu could do a problem in his head doesn't mean he shouldn't use a calculator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is really putting it when the old, like, coding challenges was this thing called Fizzbuzz, where you try and write out numbers from 0 to 1, and if it's. If it's odd or if it's divisible by three, you write fizz, and if it's divisible by seven, you write buzz. And then if it's visible by both, you write fizzbuzz. And it's like a very basic coding challenge, but it always assumes that you have access to Python. Like, and it's not saying, okay, you have to go and like fab your own semiconductor to do it. And so it makes sense that like you know, we are in the age of LLMs. Like that's going to be a tool.

That don't give Eric ideas. Kareem might start requiring the team. You're going to have to be able to set up your own semi fab in order to write it out in.

Binary with a pen and paper engineering.

With your own silicon.

Yeah. One interesting thing we've talked a lot about this Move 37 concept, Lisa doll, the Google DeepMind challenge, they beat Lisa doll. And in Move 37 it was like this moment of true inspiration where AlphaGo put a piece on the board that was so unexpected, Lisa Doll stood up, went outside, smoked a cigarette and was like, had his mind blown. Right. And we've had moments like that. Maybe the Studio Ghibli moment is this. Like we've had passing the touring test, but there's also been plenty of areas that feel more intractable in terms of artificial intelligence. And it feels like if you are like with the latest IMO problem 6 was this combinatorics problem that I don't understand but neither does OpenAI or Google apparently. So you know, we're basically the same. But my, but my question is like, is like with the AI agents product, are there, are there things that you see CFOs, modern CFOs do, like what is the, the humanities last exam, the intractable problem, the most elegant, beautiful thing that a CFO can do that feels like, oh, this is going to be something that's happening and requires like the human touch for a very, very long time.

I think, I think my, my, my immediate thought to give you, give you some time to think is it feels like AI today is really good at doing the work that like a management consultant could do. So you can like tell them like I run this type of business, like make me a marketing plan or come up with five ideas for marketing, you know, strategies and Q4 and it will create like a great report. It'll look great, it'll have some, maybe some decent ideas and yet it still feels like to do truly exceptional work. Like we like Monday, like the three of us spent like couple hours talking about some, some campaign and like debating it and all these different points and it's like we could have had AI in the mix there but you could imagine to be tossing in ideas that, that were kind of maybe random and maybe something helpful. But it was still like you just like people needed to just like sit there and just like hash it out and it feels like that's, that's like, you know, do the work to like do analysis, create reports, you know, when it comes to like actual knowledge work. Yeah, but anyways, I don't know what your thought is.

I love this line of questioning and I think it's going to get super interesting, especially as AI is going from a primarily academic tool. And also in some ways I feel like it's jumped into software engineering in part because software engineers know what it is to code and they're working with AI and so they have good taste and there's these great feedback loops and so it's happening there sooner but it's starting to make it into general business, logic, finance, everything. I think a good place to start if you just want to decompose. The problem is like what is the job of finance actually? What is it? And I think if you were to just really simplifying it down, it's in my view some subset of you're going to define a set of rules that govern who is able to spend what under what circumstances, what are the controls you have in place. Once activity has occurred, you've spent money, things are coming in. How do you record that activity accurately, close your books and then based on what occurred, how do you go seek to more profitability, more growth, more cash flow, whatever thing you're going to go try to go do. Yeah, that's about it. And if you really kind of simplify it, it's just a set of rules and algorithms, these systems, one, they're incredibly complicated to do each of those things. And so I actually think like brilliant people have over the last 50, 100 years been reduced to like, I don't know, in some cases like tabulators just calculating things or like downloading the same spreadsheet over and over or matching the receipts and doing like very low level tasks and only doing a little bit, you know, after you finally look.

A great example is like when any, any like, like TV show about business. Yeah, it's like, like you look at like the office, all of this. Was any real work done like you did? Was there ever? You don't, you don't really. Do you remember a time when they were maybe once or twice they called a customer or they did a customer meeting, but outside of that it's like thousands of hours of just like, yeah, doing. They're doing business but they're not. Like are they really getting anything done? And so I think, I think the point you're making is like how much of the work that we do is, should, should be the work that we're doing.

You nailed it. Like, I think so much of work is very mechanical and it's, you know, we want finance to be forward thinking and strategic but the reality of a lot of finance is looking backward.

I think that's. Yeah, yeah, I think that the strategic thing is really key. Like, like Tyler Cowan would say that like relationships are very lindy and going to stick around for a long time, trust building, that type of stuff. But Ben Thompson dumped some sort of, you know, 10Q into ChatGPT and said like make me a Ben Thompson style article. And it did some of it, but it didn't have Uncanny. Yeah, yeah. It didn't have like the actual strategic insights and the storytelling that can actually like marshal the proper resources. And I feel like that's in many ways the job of cfo. It's risk taking, it's deciding the right strategy for the situation and it seems like the frontier models are not quite there yet.

You nailed it. And I think that when I think about the next set of years with the fundraise we tried to lay out of like we're seeing glimmers of like this whole industry is going to get rewritten. What do we think the industry looks like over the next three to five years? What does the org look like? And we laid that out in the post. But I think the biggest transformation is really, really, I think most of the finance function today, unfortunately, unfortunately is very backward looking. But I think as automation, agentic workflows are coming to the forefront in platforms like Ramp, actually more people can be looking forward, can be spending time, you know, on like, for Ben Thompson, like what are the really interesting breakthrough theories and how do you go and make things better? And when I think of like what is that last exam ultimately for a finance organization is, you know, I think there are companies that have taken these tests. So I think one of the interesting studies I think about is Amazon in its early days. They were very early and they would send email follow ups to customers. You just bought this. And the old way of doing email marketing to customers was someone would write like if you've seen like the Trader Joe's newsletter where someone writes like these poetic things about the new ingredients and cool stuff, come try this. And whatever. Amazon did that in the 90s. There was an editorial team talking about the great new product products that were coming online on Amazon.com and then there was this Personalization team. It's like, I don't know, P12N or whatever it is. And they said, we're going to a B test it. This personalization team. You're going to get 10% of the send volume. And your job is to just go and try to find these weird connections. These move 37s of like, you just bought this, you may be interested in this product. And for a long time, humans crushed the personalization team. There was something kind of in the example of how these marketers thought that was better get better and better and better till one day the personalization team, the volume, started winning and it kept winning. And there is no team that is sending like newsletters around. And so, you know, it turns out algorithmically, on single products, you might be able to go and have a better algorithm recommendations. I still think for quite a while there was a role for creative CFOs in thinking about these unexpected strategies. It's sort of, in some ways, like, I don't know, make it about you guys for a second. The media industry has been at it for a long time. You know, there's live streaming, you know, TV has been around for a while. No one saw this. And suddenly, like, this is one of the most, I think, important things happening, you know, in broadcasting. It's your show.

Thank you.

You guys saw it.

Yeah.

And I think there's room for people of great taste who are great marketers, who are great leaders, CFOs. And so no, I'm bullish. Actually, when you have time to think about the interesting work.

100%. Yeah. Like there's one world where you see the expense policy is like a set of if statements. And there's a different world where you start thinking about expenses as like bets and risk taking and actual like, what is the net present value of buying that particular thing? Will this pay off for the business? Does this actually increase shareholder value when you buy even just those pencils versus those pens? Like, that's really also.

I mean, I mean, yeah, there's so much, you know, finance historically is, you know, looking backwards and you can make decisions based on that. Be like, well, we spent this on this, we shouldn't do that again. But there's also so much you can bring in of like even helping understand, projecting out. Did you know, if you adopted this tool and then you grow headcount 20% or 30% or 100%, you know, this is going to be in a year if you keep this existing, you know, plan contract, you're going to be spending you know, some crazy multiple of what you're paying today. So. And there's so much.

So what's next for the company? Is the job finished?

Yeah, everybody, everybody in the chat's asking, job finished?

Is the job finished?

The job is not finished. Guys, I'm still. We're still. We can't believe it. There's so much to do.

Let's go.

Job not finished. Confirmed.

No, guys, this, this is.

I love this thing.

No, it's like, it's like we're pleased, we're happy. But like this is the crazy thing about our industry is that any business that spends money could be a ramp customer and we've come a long way.

They will, they will be, they must be.

They must be shoulds and they must. I don't know. We're working hard on it. But guys, most, most people, you know, pour one out for our friends like expenses. Closing the books. It is the worst hour of their month. It doesn't have to be. Yep, we're going to change that.

Fantastic.

Incredible.

Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

It's a ton, a ton of fun.

Yeah, we'll see you later.

And please recommend your tailor to me. I got to get one of these things.

We'll put you in touch.

Let's read through Ben Thompson's analysis of the Figma S1, the Figma OS and Figma's AI potential finally course in Manhattan for Figma's IPO tomorrow. We're very excited about that.

We will be live from Nice. The New York Stock Exchange.

Yes. Cannot so Bloomberg has a story here. Figma's initial public offering is approaching 40 times oversubscribed according to people familiar with the matter.

Is that good?

The design and collaboration software. We'll have to. We'll have to ask everyone tomorrow if it's good.

Did they get the same revenue multiple oversubscribed they are could be the year.

The year's most in demand listing. The company is guiding prospective investors at its IPO which could raise as much as 1.2 billion is expected to price above the mark the marketed range the people said the San Francisco based firm and some Investors are offering 36.9 million shares at 30 to $32 per share after increasing the range Monday from 25 to $28 each order taking is expected to end at noon on Tuesday in New York Bloomberg News has reported over subscription refers to when the number of orders for shares in the IPO exceeds shares that were originally offered.

And so a lot of demand for Figma shares which Makes sense. It has been one of the most in demand Secondary helps you think better and build faster. That's right.

Helps design and development teams build great products together. What's not to like?

Nothing like mixing an ad into at least this is Ben Thompson's analysis, right? So Ben Thompson is not sponsored by figma.

No. We had a friend of the show come on and break down the S1 when the, when the numbers dropped and it was kind of like the dream case for, for SaaS. Right.

Coming out and immediately being the top, you know, from a purely metrics based look, the top SaaS company in public, SAS company.

And of course a lot of people point to the rule of 40. You add the growth rate to the burn rate, how much money you're losing. If you're losing a lot of money but you're growing really fast, that's fine if you're, if you're making a ton of money but growing slower. Either way, they should add up to at least 40% higher the better. And if you add figma's up, they are, they are in the 70%. So well beyond 40. 40% according to the rule of 40, which is of course exciting to the venture capitalists who popularized the rule of 40.

They basically created profitability.

So he says, I think you can make the case that an $18 billion valuation is in fact too low. Indeed, I think you can make the company make the case that the company is worth more than 20 billion. Adobe agreed to buy it for 20 billion back in 2022. That of course is despite the rise of generative AI, which at first glance appear to be a threat to figma. Because you just go to chatgpt and say, hey, build me a collaborative software tool and maybe it just makes mistakes, don't make mistakes. But he says, I would go in the other direction. Generative. Generative AI and the opportunity it resents represents is exactly why Figma should go public, as Field strongly suggests, and get ready to be acquisitive, get ready to.

Get ready to get bought.

Do some deals we love. We love a Dylan Field deal.

The Figma os. Ben says the reason why I'm optimistic about Figma comes from my belief that Figma is not simply design software. Rather, it's something much more fundamental and valuable, an operating system with a collaboration built in. Here is how I explain Figma back when Adobe tried to acquire them. Forgive the long excerpt, he says, but it really is the point as far as my optimism about figma is concerned. He says here it is important to note that Figma's most prominent victim to date has not been Adobe, but rather Sketch. The explosion in apps led to a growing market for product and design, product design and development, as designers needed to lay out a whole host of different app views and developers needed to know what exactly the designers wanted them to build. Photoshop and Illustrator, which were primarily focused on the creation and editing of single files, were the completely wrong tools for the job. Sketch, which was released in 2010 as a Mac OS app and is still Mac OS only, although it now includes the ability to view files on the web completely, took the category by storm. Adobe eventually responded with Adobe XD, but not until 2015, and the product is still in third place. Sketch, though, is now only in second.

Really quickly let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Continue.

Jordy Chris, the CEO of Adquick, is in New York as well. We're going to try to meet up with him in a little bit. Sketch was not a disruptive product. It was like Adobe's products, a desktop app. It just delivered a solution to an emerging product category that Adobe was slow to respond to, and that was like the designing of web and mobile products. Figma though, was something completely new. The company, which was founded in 2012, made a bet on the browser and spent a full four years building V1 of the product this included, which is just so funny because normally if you talk to a founder building a software company and they said, yeah, I'm three years in and I haven't shipped an mvp, you would just immediately write the company off because like, you know, why haven't you shipped? In this case it was necessary.

Quit your job, raise $10 million vibreal, launch video slop like product in two seconds. Like that's the, that's the flow and then a ton of bugs and then, and then sort it out and then maybe it works, but it's don't worry.

About securing personally identifiable information at all. Just get to the top of the charts and figure it out later. So this included writing the editor in C, cross compiling it to JavaScript using the ASM JS subset. That let it achieve desktop like control of memory and performance and building its own rendering engine from scratch using WebGL, which had only been released in 2011. WebGL was the why now for the business and Dylan was very early to recognizing that it was the epitome of leveraging new technologies to compete on a new vector, which in this case was collaboration. And you know, anybody under the age of 25. Like probably doesn't remember the pre pre Figma era, but like having different files and sending them back and forth and like sending comments by email. It's just like it. Even even personally I only briefly was was working without having access to Figma. So Ben says, think about my brief description for this product design and development segment. Multiple app views created by design and implemented by engineering imply at least two different people working on a project. A designer and a developer. In reality, the huge number of views and increased functionality in apps meant that there was an increasingly large teams on both sides. Sketch definitely made it easier to design an app in one place, but it did nothing to make it easier for teams to work on on the app together. Figma, because it was native to the web, effectively got collaboration for free from the beginning.

Yeah, this is a crazy screenshot. I don't know if we can show this but on on Figma's website the company compares itself to Adobe xd But I use Photoshop and Illustrator. Don't stop. We believe you should use the best tool for the job. If you're photo editing, choose Adobe Photoshop. If you're doing detailed illustrations, Adobe Illustrator is a no brainer. But if you're looking for the best tool for UX design, Figma is here for you. Plus you can easily import images and SVG code into Figma and have your cake and eat it too. And so putting the competitors products right there. So eventually Photoshop and Adobe did launch a competitor called XD& XD wound up is getting killed by Figma. But no one ever subscribed to Creative Cloud for xd. You just used it because it was here. So is Ben Thompson. Here's the problem though. To the extent that Adobe's products were being used as part of Figma's workflow was the extent to which Adobe was slowly but surely losing control of its long term relevance. Figma could for example, start investing much more heavily into its photo editing or illustration capabilities, rendering Adobe's products increasingly unnecessary. What is more threatening is Figma's cross platform capabilities. Third party developers can build plugins for Figma that make it possible to easily add the sort of editing capabilities. So regulators blocked the Adobe deal and Ben Thompson says he thinks it was correct. The regulators got it correct that time and based on the run that Figma's been on ever since, it seems like it could be a win for them as well. Yeah, and it's interesting because a lot.

Of sane roller coaster for the team and figma I think during the acquisition process clearly didn't have the insane urgency to launch new products because they thought they were going to, you know, Adobe and would be part of an organization with a bunch of different individual apps and, and watching how they reacted after it was blocked and then came and just started shipping like crazy.

And so the FTC has gone after some, some mergers that have made no sense. Like they, I believe they blocked like Roomba. The Roomba one? Yeah, that one didn't make sense. The worst example I can think of is Meta bought a VR fitness app and they said that Meta was trying to create a monopoly in the VR fitness market, which is just not a market at all. It doesn't even exist and I don't know anyone that does VR fitness and it's very rare. And so it totally makes sense to let that team get an exit and go hang out at Meta and try and work on this until creating the market. And then as soon as it takes off, there's going to be a ton of competitors immediately. And so it seems like totally fine to let that one go through. And then there are, there are other sides where, where like truly there are like two players and they're merging and there's going to be a lot of, a lot of competitive dynamics that come from that. Anyway, let me tell you about Bezel. Pre owned luxury watches authenticated in house. Bezel is the top marketplace in the world for authenticated luxury watches.

And again, just more context. So Amazon, Amazon's acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba, was blocked due to antitrust concerns, which was primarily from the European Commission. Yeah, they were worried about a monopoly in home robotics, I guess, and the CEO ended up just resigning.

What's interesting is like the robotic vacuum market is extremely competitive because of a lot of the Chinese companies, UFI and there's a few others. Like it is definitely not as much of like it feels like a lot less of a sticky product because yes, it maps your home and it's supposed to learn, but really if you move to a new place and you get a different robot vacuum cleaner, like you're pretty much good after a day. You're not like, oh, I can't get out of the Roomba ecosystem. Whereas like even Sonos is stickier than that. And so I never had a problem with that.

And iRobot shares are down 95% over the last looking over we'd actually got.

Blocked and then they just got cooked.

Yeah, they actually went public July 31, 2020.

No way.

Stock popped to $133 a share by early 2021. It's now sitting at $4.28. One hundred and thirty million.

One hundred thirty million.

So a little bit of value destruction from the European.

Imagine how frustrating that'd be. You're like, I think I'm getting out to like the most logical acquirer possible. So Figma's position and the AI potential. Consider the position Figma has in the software design process. First, figma enables collaboration, their original differentiator from Adobe and Sketch. Second, figma creates one canvas for app creation, everything based on the same URL, set of files that are passed around with increasingly absurd file name appendages. You know, final, final, final, v3, v4, v1, final, final. Third, Figma serves as a source of truth for an app's design. These capabilities seamlessly translate into AI enabled.

Workflows and these capabilities seamlessly translate to AI enabled workflows. Collaboration today between a host of humans could very well mean coordination and orchestration of AI. Critically, figma isn't assuming or relying on an AI doing everything. Granted that is a theoretical threat to the company. But the problem with AI only development processes is that they are extremely difficult to debug or decompose. Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI.

Yeah.

So Ben Thompson kind of closes out talking about figma as the OS of design being important. What operating systems have is coordination and orchestration abilities, one canvas where all the work happens.

So the source of truth.

And then for now, for now, figma gets its nascent AI gates the capabilities behind a full seat license that is the most expensive plans. They also have usage based model, but they. Ben Thompson is advocating for figma to move towards some sort of usage based or task based monetization model. This is what selling workforce.

Yeah, salesforce selling the end product.

Exactly. As opposed to based. And so that will be a business model transition. And he says that the transition will be tricky and it's arguably the best argument against Figma going public because if all of a sudden you shift to hey, we don't charge per seat, we charge per finished design or finished website or shipped website, then all of a sudden you could see that you wind up with a much better business model four quarters out. But you have two rough quarters and the public markets don't like that. And people always talk about that being one of the reasons. One of the drawbacks of being public is that is that you have a lot of investors that are a little bit more short term oriented. But he says I think however that it is notable that Field mentioned M and A dur in his argument for going public. Figma would do well to start acquiring AI companies to plug into every aspect of its stack. Particularly now when AI capability is nascent and not yet a threat to figma as a whole. Above I was skeptical about AI replacement replacing figma but that is a skepticism that is relevant for the short term. Figma's task is to replace itself before anyone else has the chance in the long term.

Looks like we have our first.

Let's bring them in.

Andrew Reed in a beautiful suit looking. Somebody. Somebody confused me. You guys do look earlier they said hey we're Andrew, right? I said I am not but he is close by. What's going on?

Andrew? Welcome to the stream. You're live. How you doing?

You are live.

Here's Mike from the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you for having us.

Look like you were made to be here.

Yes, we're very happy to be here.

The decision to put on the suits six months ago has paid off flawlessly because we don't have to dress up for something like this.

Is this my microphone?

That's your microphone.

Wonderful.

How are you doing? Give us your reactions. How's this day been for you?

Let's see. Well first off congrats to your initial public appearance at the New York Stock Exchange.

Thank you. Thank you.

It's exciting. Today has been, it's been a good day. You know you open Dylan rang the bell at 9:30 and it's 2:11pm Eastern right now.

Sure.

So we've been milling around for many hours.

It's a little exhausting.

It opened and yeah it's amazing seeing the team here and just the excitement of everyone chanting Figma and seeing all the traders in their swagged out Figma jackets.

Yeah, yeah the jackets are amazing. To go and start market, you know, bidding jackets. Yeah, yeah because those are the secondary. The thing that stood out to me is all the little like they really made Nicee their home. Like every, like every single place you look there's something Figma and it's just so incredibly well done. Yeah.

And this one of my, one of the experiences I've had with Figma dating back to when we first invested seven years ago was it's a company that.

Overnight success.

Overnight success. It's a company that's always had extraordinary attention to detail and it shows up when you do an all hands at their office. S1 the board slides, the S1 config, the conference and how they applied that attention to detail to the NYSE is incredible because there's applying the attention to detail and then realizing all the things you can do in terms of the signs on the ground and the party outside. They just did an unbelievable job.

You have to be doing things that haven't been done before.

Yeah, I mean I think the takeover outside was like breathtaking. And I'm obviously very biased because when I see the pickle logo I get very excited.

But did you see the roadshow? Did you go to any of the roadshow? I heard there was like a long product demo there which is kind of uncommon.

Yeah. So I think this is true for many CEOs, but especially for Dylan. Like Dylan cares a lot about the product and it's important that everybody who is considering investing in the company really knows what figment, not just what figment stands for in design and creativity and all the things you see, but really how the product works. And it was not a five minute flyby look at the cool shiny features the product demo was. They were in the weeds. I in fact uncovered parts of the product I didn't know existed, but it was good. I think it's important that. And again, part of that's who Dylan is. He actually cares so deeply about every single pixel and every single feature. And then that shows through.

How early did you actually meet Dylan? Sarah Guo was posting earlier that pre launch they were burning $800,000 a month, which just sounds like that's the most nerve wracking scenario for any. A lot of founders will go through that at some point. But when did you realize what a special founder he was?

Well, Dylan and Evan, by the way, I think it's a nice moment to take a pause and just give a shout out to Evan Wallace, like an absolute legend. I think the stories that people here tell about Evan are just, they'll go on. Chris, who's going to come on next is Figma cto. He'll I think have a lot of. He'll tell you actually all the stuff Evan did in the code base but allegedly it's entirely insane and you know.

Well and just going like taking another step back. People have like, people love to use Figma as an example that it's okay to take a long time to ship your product. And I think most like almost always when I hear a founder say, well Figma took four years, I go, well, you're not Evan Wallace and you're not like fundamentally changing, you know, the way that that software works online. You're building enterprise workflows you should probably ship next month. Yeah.

The other thing about the you can take as long as you need. Figma, there's something that Roloff talks a lot about for our business, which is the red queen dynamic. You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. And I think in a world of accelerating technology change, in order to win in your markets, you just have to run the company faster and do more. And obviously AI is allowing companies to do a lot more.

Isn't the red queen race usually an anecdote of something you want to avoid getting into?

Well, that's just the truth of technology.

I think the truth of venture capital and the truth of enterprise software business to business software.

And if you look at how when figma went from 4 products to 8 products, I config the pace. I think everyone who uses the product feels it like the pace is just picking up.

Yeah.

We got a little preview of config and I messaged Nayri. I was like, wait, you're announcing all of this config? Like all four of these? It was like four major announcements. And that's what picking up the pace looks like. Finding that new gear.

Yeah. How are you thinking about org design changing in the age of AI? This is something I've been talking to a lot of folks about. There's taking, you know, designers and giving them the ability to ship code. They're kind of this flip from going from a 0x engineer, a designer, to a 1x engineer. And that gain can sometimes be better than taking a 10x engineer and making them a little bit better because you just unlock this new capability. How are you thinking about companies just broadly thinking about AI as a. As a product vertical that is its own silo versus something that infuses the whole company. What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

I've been thinking about that question a lot. The way I kind of craft the archetype would be the creative technologist. And I think in the same way that all of us are capable of scribbling something on a piece of paper when we're bored in a meeting, I think similarly, all of us are going to be capable of creating something on the Internet.

It's actually interactive.

Exactly. And I think that has been happening for a while. I think it's picking up steam and incredible pace. And I think this role of creative technologist, I think in big companies you'll still probably have siloed engineering, product design, marketing teams. I think in our small companies, the founding engineers, founding teams, people are Wearing a lot of hats and using tools like Figma to do everything from ideation, to prompt something, to iterate, get in hands of users and to actually publish code. I think that the small companies, I.

Bet my buddy Andreessen said that when I was first pitching them, we weren't like actually raising yet. I didn't have a deck and so I just was in figma screen sharing, showing them the product and showing them all the different ways that we were gonna take it and things like that. And it's just, and again that's just like evidence of Figma not being for designers. No, I never thought, I thought it was a tool for building things.

Exactly.

Yeah. One dynamic Ben Thompson has been talking about is that as a public company sometimes it can be easier to do M and A. Have you ever run into that in your career, just broadly of a company that, where that is an important factor in kind of their long term strategy? I've always, generally the meme has been like stay private as long as possible. But you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits. But, but what is the M and A dynamic in public and private markets right now?

Yeah, I think the, you know, there's what you learn when you start out at Goldman Sachs and it's, you know, it's, you have access to the capital markets, you can use a public currency for M and A, you know, blah, blah, blah. Tell your story to me. The reason why I'm so happy with the IPO timing today is coming off of config a few months ago and just like feeling the energy, you guys were there, you felt the energy amongst the community, like the incredible community surrounding figma and then being able to tell that story and all the stuff we're doing with our new product initiatives with AI and tell it to the broader world. You know, in the S1 we reported I think 13 million monthly active users, 2/3 of which are not designers. And you know, they got.

Did you, did you know, did you, did you, was that, was that your guess early on? Did you, did you fully see that the TAM for this was not like how many designers are there and just like add it up and multiply it. Did you, I imagine you believe that it could be used across TAM expanders?

It's similar to what I was saying with the, you know, I think the creative technologist archetype who's going to do a lot of things and eventually in 10 years the way that companies run their product engineering teams will probably look very different. I think similarly, like there were, there were even, you know, predating our investment. There were definitely examples of teams that went all in on the Figma way, collaborative way of building products and you had, you know, full product engineering design teams at small companies or even at mid sized companies. I remember Airbnb and Square were in our portfolio and we talked to them before we invested and they were, you know, early at pioneering this. You know, we're getting off of the Dropbox links being sent around. You know, we're going all in on, on working in Figma. And it turns out it was a much better way of shipping products if you wanted to ship really good products quickly. And therefore the entire world seemingly changed its mind in a few years. I think similarly, some small companies are going to pioneer new ways of doing things. They're going to move really fast. It's going to be obvious that there's a new archetype emerging. I think many of those people are going to live in figma. I think the most creative community community on the Internet today already exists in figma.

I always, it felt even I remember using it as a, like a social app. Like in the sense that like I would get, I would, it'd be late at night, I would open my laptop and I'd be like, oh, Brandon's up. Go over to wherever he was designing. I'd be like, hey, what's up dude?

Yeah.

And it was like this, like, it was like almost like a lot of people built the, in these like virtual offices, but like Figma was our virtual.

Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah, I'd just be like, hey, what's up? Or I'd just like start, you know, I just mess with them and like change of button colors.

Yeah. The only thing I'm really excited about with the new products is, you know, they're both raising the ceiling of what it is possible to do for the most creative people in figma. You know, like with Figma Draw, for instance. Right. Like the ability to do like really interesting artistic creative work inside of Figma files and also massively raising the floor for those of us who are more Excel inclined in our creative abilities. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think it's so rare to find technology shifts that allow companies to capture both of those things. Usually there's a trade off and yeah, it's really exciting.

I mean, Excel kind of served the same purpose but decades ago, right?

Totally. Yeah. And similarly to the idea of, you know, Figma slides came out of this intuition or not intuition, just the reality that Many people were talking Figma files in slide decks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had a. I had a file called deck formatting.

Yeah.

I've shared with probably hundreds of people at this point of, like, this is how I build decks, this is how I build fundraising decks. Here's like, you know, 50 examples for each page and I would just send it out to everyone. They could just copy it and start working off of it.

Can you add me to that, Bo? That sounds good.

Yeah, it's great. We don't have to make many decks at the end. We should start making more decks just for each other.

Yeah, we should. Yeah. Be great. Last question. I think we'll let you go. I want to talk about the culture and hiring changes and just how going public changes any of that. How do you describe the culture of, like, someone who's a good fit to become a figmate?

Ooh, that's a really good question. You know, when I was reflecting as.

The Series C leave, when I was.

Reflecting on what I was going to tweet today, you know, because there's always a fine balance. Right. Like, how do I tweet something to say congrats without doing the, you know, can you believe this amazing event? You know, So I kind of went into a very paranoid headspace of how do I get, you know, not end up in the wrong quadrant?

We just go too far. You're welcome, everyone.

You said congrats to the incredible, incredible Figma team. The most creative, determined, imaginative and positive group of people. I'm just so happy for all of your success.

There we go.

And I was. I almost responded. Our success.

So those are those four adjectives. I think they are creative. I think I tried to pull off an analogy when I was talking to you guys at Config about how everybody, everybody who was at Config would be a good tattoo artist for my face painting artist for my daughter. And my brother said that was. That analogy did not land. They're very creative. I think they're extremely determined. I think, like, this is a company that, you know, when the early days of burning however much money they were burning a month and not having product market fit and grinding your way to market fit and all the twists and turns over the last seven, eight years since they really started their ascent.

But you still have, like the hardcore WebGL crew.

Yeah.

And that's like all. It's not like, quite like foundation model, but it's like serious engineering.

It's a company that does hardcore things. They are not afraid of doing really hard things. I think they're imaginative. I think that's like, you know, the make believe billboard you see in San Francisco. It's a company that really does think out there. And I think Dylan, obviously, Dylan is on the bleeding edge of technology. And they're positive, like they are just good human beings. And you know, looking at, obviously the reaction to the, to the IPO is just look around. These are awesome people who are so cool.

Cool.

The valedictorian of my high school works at figma. Her name is Katie Zito. She's a PM here. She's literally like the smartest person I knew in high school. And you know, now she builds products of Figma. And anyway, I'm just so happy. I really am happy for their success and your success.

Yes.

I didn't put it out, but yesterday we did the. We did it meme with Ramp. Every person.

I sent you that.

Yeah, that was great. But now Ramp's congratulating Figma with the big billboard today or the big banana.

You know, they had that idea Monday. We were on the phone with them. They're like, yeah, we think we might get a banner and like hang. Because our office is right across the street from figma's New York office. We should just hang it out. And it's like this like 44.

It's unbelievable.

It looks like I didn't even know.

You can get something like that made in.

I will say the Ramp thinking FIGMA with tvpn. The New York Stock Exchange stays a big day.

Today's a big day. Well, it's lovely having.

Yeah.

Thanks for being here.

Enjoy talking to everyone else. Obviously. Hope to see you later.

Congratulations on your success too.

Congratulations.

Let's give a little bit of coverage of updates on the FIGMA ipo. Of course. There was a funny post in here from Juwan.

Okay.

Juan apparently got a offer back in 2019.

Okay. Territory.

And he was going to get a base of 165k a year and 300,000 in figma RSUs.

300,000 shares.

And I guess by his calculation it would have turned into 30 million. But the important thing, Juwan is now getting the. The ability to spend his time automating finance.

Yes.

And certainly didn't pick a bad company to join on that front. Gary Tan says if you stick around in tech and you're good, sooner or later you start collecting these stories. I think. Remember Gary designed the Palantir logo back in the day. Crazy. And I wonder if he held on.

Yeah. It's a trillion dollar company.

More Siki ran some numbers. Siki Chen said there's 10x returners, there's fund returners and there's Fig. Figma alone returned 10x the entire fund of not one, not two but three VC funds. So he pulls up Index Ventures which made their initial investment out of a seed fund. It was a 4 million dollar investment or 3.9 million out of a 400 million dollar fund. And it is a 1850 X multiple. They're, they're.

What's the multiple of fund on that?

The fund multiple is 18x Greylock. Greylock who did the series A is sitting on an 11x fund. They did the, the series A out of a 600 million dollar fund. KP which did the series B.

Is.

Sitting on a 10x fund out of a 700 million dollar fund which is just wild. And then Sequoia will have returned one and a half X on a two and a half billion dollar fund.

That's great. Just from that one deal.

And then there's other stuff in portfolio. Yeah. Gary chimes in, says grand slam home run business.

Yep, yep.

It's not just a home run business. It's a grand slam home run business. Yeah.

This is good advice for all the VCs out there and just get one.

Figma in your pocket. I noted this on the timeline yesterday, but we are retiring the gong that we had at Nicee yesterday. It's a game hit gong by none other than Dylan Field. So we still need to get him to sign it and date it of course. But pretty, pretty, pretty wild. Delian says greatest capital markets on earth, greatest country on earth and throws up not one but three American flags quoting signals, signals post. He said nothing hits like an IPO in America. It's the most iconic cultural moment that's relatively infrequent. The most beautiful part about it is that not only here does a company going public trigger a national feedback loop of inspiration. Kids watch it, builders feel it and the next gen catches fire nowhere else. Turns liquidity into legacy. So signal is such a funny posting style. Very, very unique. Good job and yeah, pretty, pretty insane.