It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions.
The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.
Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.
The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled.
Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.
Why would Gitlab want Figma? Could it afford it? I am sure the owners of Figma thought this was the best available option. It’s their company - not yours or the governments. If they want to sell their property it’s theirs to sell.
Would Gitlab make it a better product if it was sold to them?
It's just an example of a non-monopolistic acquisition. There are other examples of larger companies that may be able to support it better, like Microsoft or Dropbox or Zoom or something.
DropBox isn’t doing to well itself if you haven’t checked. How well are their previous acquisitions doing? Would you rather have a company acquire Figma with no expertise in the area (MS)?
I think everyone would prefer Figma to continue to be an independent business that challenges and competes with Adobe, forcing both products to be better.
“Everyone” but the people who own the company, created the product, found investors, took the risk of starting their own company, the employees who all could have probably made more money during the intervening years by working for BigTech.
Their priorities and wants are a lot more important than yours.
If you had an idea that attracted investor interest, convinced engineers to forego BigTech compensation and created a product that people wanted, I am sure your opinion would matter a lot more.
No. But I hate the idea that people who did absolutely nothing to create the company think they by proxy of the government should have the right to tell others to do with their property. If you want a company that meets your ideals - create a company yourself.
Customers do to some degree have a sense of ownership over the product. Marketers literally try to cultivate that "sense of ownership" factor. Especially where there's network effects, or a marketplace ecosystem forming. It very literally becomes a community and a standard.
More and more I think we'll see companies have to signal their intentions and be lightly bound to their community, or see those ecosystems form somewhere else instead.
The best for the acquirers and acquired isn't necessarily, and is in fact rarely, the best for the consumers at large. Unless you want to end up in an abusive relationship in all of your transactions, governments should intervene to keep things level, competitive and innovative.
"history". Yes, that concise and short read that just tells you government bad. Do you have anything in particular in mind?
I really struggle to find an excuse for not wanting to involve government regulations in obvious cases like monopolies almost monopolies. Even some libertarians, who are far from being a logical bunch of people, agree with this (alongside safety regulations and sometimes even infrastructure). The free market cannot function properly when it concerns externalities, infrastructure with high upfront costs, monopolies/oligopolies.
Fuck yes. The government is there for everyone. I want to not be abused as a consumer by for instance having a single ISP, phone manufacturer, etc. etc. price gouging me and everyone else, and i practice what i preach.
In a similar vein, i don't want trash on the ground, so i inconvenience myself by collecting my trash and throwing it at the appropriate places. You know, normal "sacrifices" one does as the cost of participating in a society.
I understand why people like Figma. But just because you don’t like that Figma is selling their company doesn’t mean that the government should be involved.
When a group of people thought they wanted a better operating system and databases that can’t be acquired - they created an open source offering. They didn’t depend on government intervention.
Many of us think the VC approach to business has perverse incentives and is fundamentally broken, with large exits basically demanding megacorp purchases, who then hand large dividends back to the investors behind the scheme. No matter who loses, the house always wins. I post here in spite of YC and pg, who I both dislike equally very much.
Even though you don’t like how VCs operate, you are taking advantage of a product (HN) that is funded by them. But yet, the founders of Figma shouldn’t be able to maximize their returns?
Sure you could, if you have the courage of your convictions you could have a pursued a career in public service and worked for a non profit. Did you do that?
You don't know my convictions and are projecting them on to me.
This kind of abuse of power dynamic is directly conflicting Hayek's view on competition and on antitrust from 1946.
There's this modern ideology of reactionary fealty to every abuse of power like some masochist vigorously shaking pom poms at every market exploit and cheering "thank you, give me more!"
You know how utterly indefensible that position is and so instead of even attempting to do that you try to pry into my personal life and imagine you've found inconsistencies from which you mount a personal attack on my character.
Give me a break. A company buying up its competition to dismantle it is garbage and plenty of even Austrian economists agree.
Living a life a charity isn't required to see when an emperor wears no clothes.
Actually it is, you’re not willing to give up your comfortable lifestyle and trade your labor for the most compensation that you can yet you clutch your pearls wondering why those evil capitalist pigs aren’t willing to make the same sacrifices.
Anyone who makes a living by working for a private company and then saying the same private companies are evil, don’t have the courage of their convictions and are false clutching their pearls
My lifestyle is afforded to me because I trade my labor for money at a for profit company (BigTech). I am not clutching my pearls bemoaning the evils of capitalism while feeding from the very same troughs.
I’m not sure why you think that 100% market freedom ought to be this audience’s primary index of importance. Many of us own or work for companies that will likely be negatively impacted by this. Antitrust has been systematically marginalized over the last 40 years, and despite prevailing narratives, this is not necessarily a net good for entrepreneurs.
There purpose for existing and our reasons for coming don't need to be the same. Very few readers/posters have a ycombinator startup. Stronger feelings towards YC ideals would be found on the private ycominator channel.
The goal of facebook is some meta universe. Most users go on to write a friend..
How many readers and posters on HN do you think work for a startup where they are hoping their equity in a private VC backed company will be worth something? How many posters work for one of those “evil monopolist” where a great percentage of their livelihood is based on their RSUs doing well? Even if you do work for a private profitable “lifestyle business” that is profitable and was bootstrapped, I bet your company’s owners would sell their company in a heartbeat if the right “monopolist” pulled up with a truck load of money.
It's not the acquisition itself. It's what company acquires it. Adobe is the IBM of creative tools. (If not Oracle.)
OTOH being acquired by a behemoth company always feels uneasy for the product. Imagine an acquisition by Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft, or even Apple. I bet people would start imaging how Firma were to deteriorate under their corporate governance.
Ideally an acquired company is just left as is, and used as a cash cow, resulting just in the products becoming a bit more expensive for large customers.
The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.
Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.
The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.