I think the Figma IPO proves Khan was right. $60B market cap today vs the $20B Adobe offered in 2023. There was some criticism about regulatory overreach when the deal got blocked. Now Figma employees are rich, the design tools market stays competitive, and we have another major independent tech company instead of just another Adobe product line. This is exactly why we need regulators willing to tell Big Tech "no" sometimes. Competition creates more value than consolidation.
It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.
The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead.
I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through." The FTC wasn't blocking everything, just the deals that would entrench monopolies.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...
> Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face.
We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.
You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline.
And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad.
The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.
> We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.
No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.
> No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc).
This is quite false. There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline), and a few that are completely upside down (e.g. DMCA 1201), and then there are the vast majority which are the regulatory bureaucrat equivalent of busy work and are neutral at best. Positions exist to make new regulations, so they make new regulations.
But each new one has overhead, and then we get cost disease and high cost of living and increased market consolidation because regulatory compliance is a fixed cost that large corporations can bear more easily than smaller companies, and the complexity is used to disguise corruption. All of that is legitimately bad.
90% of them are completely worthless, and it's a significant problem that we have an apparatus structured to perpetually accumulate new ones without ever going back and cleaning house to remove the ones that can't be justified.
> There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline),
I think you mean to say that it had a very low cost/benefit. Otherwise, citation seriously needed.
Right winger says problem is government. Left winger says problem is corporations. Repeat ad nauseum. Yes both can be bad.
95% of regulations and 95% of companies work so fantastically that nobody realizes they exist. Sure.
But re: regulation, that 5% tends to be in the really really important stuff.
How’s housing…and healthcare… and higher education…and the national debt…in the US going?
All of those things make up vastly more than 5% of the economy and are arguably all broken in the US because of poorly designed regulation.
I think assuming most regulation is “good” is an extremely dangerous proposition given regulation is extremely difficult to change or overturn once in place.
It’s important to also remember every regulation requires enforcement at gunpoint. You cannot choose to not follow them.
Your whole comment is good but I want to signal boost the most important point you made.
Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.
> Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient.
It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be.
Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
What you want is neither of these things.
> but unless there is a law against competing with them
Ah, but that is why the monopoly uses its considerable resources to lobby passing laws that at least make it more difficult for someone to compete with them.
And then we're back to "the government should be restrained from passing that sort of economic regulation because otherwise that's what happens".
Yeah I think you're right. It's a sad commentary on the times when a group of people so far above average in caring about outcomes and data just go completely lizard brain in a way that comes out of their own paychecks.
Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention
These are people who are ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention? How can such an extreme position even begin to make sense? This is like letting boxers (or MMA fighters) fight in the ring without a referee, isn't it? As it is, there are lax rules that are getting even more relaxed by the day and even those lax rules aren't enforced consistently, for big businesses and those with money.
> big businesses and those with money
There are obviously the people in this cohort and there are also the people who think they will be in this cohort, who think they will be the victors in a cartel-like world.
Heck, before layoffs and the threat of AI started concentrating even more power into tech leadership there were plenty of tech folks along for the ride as the high paid, in demand workforce benefiting from the above.
Yeah, many people on HN act like temporarily embarrassed monopolists, ala Steinbeck [1]
[1] https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d...
So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right?
Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.
Yes because you don’t like companies being able to pay people more money?
Companies get money from workers (i.e. customers), pay some back to workers (employees), and keep the rest as profit (or waste it on some kind of bureaucratic inefficiency). Workers can get more money by either paying less as customers or getting paid more as employees.
Monopolies screw them on both ends. Customers pay more because there are fewer suppliers, and then employees make less because there is less competition for hiring which also makes it easier for the large employers to coordinate non-poaching agreements.
The fact is though in this scenario Google paid the employees more and in what tech area is Google a “monopoly”?
The fact that Google did “poach” employees means that there wasn’t an agreement not to.
In a market where there are only a small handful of incumbents and then a bunch of precarious cash-strapped startups, the incumbents collude with each other so that they only have to outbid the startups. The startups, meanwhile, are at a disadvantage because e.g. the incumbents control search engine rankings or app distribution channels, which lowers their competitiveness and therefore the amount they can afford pay to employees in competition with the incumbents. The incumbents are then the high bidder even while offering something less than they would have had to in the alternative.
The startups in question weren’t building apps or advertising on Google. The entire reason most startups exist is to get acquired or acquire hired.
Maybe that has something to do with the incumbents (and the laws) making it hard for them to build a sustainable independent new business.
So in what world are startups going to have the funding or the infrastructure to have warehouses worldwide to compete with Amazon or servers to compete with AWS?
Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
> So in what world are startups going to have the funding or the infrastructure to have warehouses worldwide to compete with Amazon or servers to compete with AWS?
In a competitive market you don't have that. Instead of a massive conglomerate having a warehouse in every region, Alice, Bob and Carol each have a warehouse near New York, Dan, Erin and Frank have one near Houston, etc., and then a dozen independent aggregators each negotiate with a warehouse in each region to store goods for anyone who wants to offer fast delivery everywhere.
Meanwhile doing that, whether you're Amazon or not, is inefficient for anything that doesn't need to be delivered on short notice. If you have a recurring subscription to get a box of toiletries every month, it doesn't matter if it arrives on the 17th because they mailed it from a local warehouse on the 16th or a centralized warehouse on the 10th, and delivery companies offer discounts if you palletize shipments based on region even if they come from a central location, which removes the cost of having local warehouses for those regions.
> Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
If there is aggregate demand for those processors then you sell them to the other people who want them regardless of whether they're within the same corporation, and then they don't have to be.
> You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
The defect is in expecting one entity to make the entire phone.
One company makes a screen, one makes a battery, one designs a processor, another fabs it, another makes memory, another makes the OS (or it's open source), another lays out the system board to integrate the various components, another does final assembly, etc.
When you don't require the whole thing to be done under the same umbrella it doesn't take a trillion dollar company to do any given piece.
> Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Suppose phone components were easily available as a fungible commodity, and had standardized interfaces so that integrating them was only a modest amount of work, i.e. a year of effort for a full-time engineer. Then you get a phone which sells as an also-ran -- a million units a year for three years, less than 0.5% of Apple's sales volume. The phone sells for $250, less than the cheapest new iPhone, and 0.5% of the retail price goes to pay the engineer.
Then they'd be making $3.75M for that year of work. Those numbers could be off by 10 fold and still be a competitive salary.
Except that the market is too concentrated and the standards don't exist, which means it's not that easy as things are now.
> Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
The issue is, is it a free market, or a captured one?
If it keeps up, it's only a matter of time before startups stop being able to hire top talent.
Most startup hiring has always been a scam for the idealistic where people would be better off statistically by just working for a publicly traded tech company that put RSUs in your brokerage account that you could immediately sell (and should) diversify once you are vested.
In my latter years of my career, I’ve been offered “great opportunities” at a startup that paid less in cash for more responsibilities than I was making as a mid level employee (cash + RSUs) at BigTech when I was there.
Of course they promised “equity” that was illiquid and probably would have been worthless.
Any evidence of that?
Google and Windsurf
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...
Amazon
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
Microsoft and Inflection
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150...
Microsoft almost pulled it off with OpenAI during the Altman fiasco.
>Google and Windsurf >https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...
that looks strange to me to say the least - a company A's leadership leases completely away the company A's IP to a company B while at the same time getting fat employment offers from the same company B. If it were in Russia i'd say it is a bribe/kickback while in US it looks suspiciously like a huge conflict of interests. How no regulatory agency looked into that...
Huge conflict of interest for who? It was a private company who only had a fiduciary responsibility to its investors and the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor.
There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor
actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ...
>There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
that has no relation to the current discussion.
I am well aware of anti poaching agreements between partners or consulting agencies and clients. I am currently working for a consulting company (full time) and in the past I was an employee at AWS ProServe.
The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach.
I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff augmentation.
Neither is the case here
It isn't about poaching. It is about how vigorously you'd be protecting the interests of your company A in a deal with company B when simultaneously negotiating your personal offer with the company B, especially if it is [even if just implicitly] packaged together i.e. "the offer happens only if the deal happens." You don't see a conflict of interests here?
There is no evidence that any of these companies had contracts with the acquiring companies before reaching out to the employees.
Listen, I think its bullshit what happened to the Windsurf people. And I'm happy that the Figma people didnt get crammed down with some scam ass preference assplay.
But blaming Lina Khan for the crime orgy that started the minute she was forced out is silly.
Go stick that blade where it belongs. I'll help any way I can.
https://youtu.be/pDaELkYEC_g
I’m sure the employees who Google hired don’t feel at all “crammed”.
The only reason they took this route instead of an acquisition is because of the current regulator environment.
But the current VP was a huge fan of Khan.
Probably talking about character.ai and a few similar cases. It's not the trend GP is making it out to be.
People in government think otherwise
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self
I thought they were dumping everyone at the moment. Unless you’re an AI researcher.
And notice who gets hired…
That means if there are 10 developer - 7 working on the product and 3 working on the fundamental AI problem, those 7 aren’t going to be left (the company didn’t want the product anyway) and the 3 researchers are going to be hired.
Something similar happened with Google and Windsurf. So who benefited from the anti acquisition mood of the previous FTC? Not most of the employees who could have made more just working for a public company in the first place and not even the investors.
Google accomplished the same thing with less red tape and didn’t have to hire the people they didn’t want.
A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs.
This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!
The under appreciated drag is which is statistically more likely to be talented?
1. Someone from a wealthy / connected family
2. Someone who scrambled to the top of 100,000 other people
Folks can argue good schools, etc. all they want, but proven ability and drive to outcompete others should be a heavy counter argument against nepotism of all sorts.
Suppose that you have an opportunity to play a game. The game is you roll a fair normal six sided die. If it comes up a 6, you get $60B. If it comes up a 5 or 4 you get $30B. If it comes up 3 or less, you get $0.
This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you.
Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some downside protection.
But then someone else says that's not allowed. So you play the game and you roll a six and get $60B.
Does that prove the person who made you play it rather than sell it was "right," ex ante?
You raise a valid point about ex ante uncertainty. We can't know future outcomes with certainty, and yes, Figma theoretically could have failed. But antitrust analysis isn't about predicting exact valuations. It's about market structure and competitive dynamics. The FTC had observable facts: Adobe's dominant market share, Figma's rapid growth trajectory, and a purchase price of 50x revenue (extraordinary even for software). These factors suggested Adobe saw Figma as a competitive threat worth eliminating, not just a financial investment. That's the key distinction from your dice game; this wasn't pure randomness but observable market dynamics. You're right that we can't prove the counterfactual. But antitrust law doesn't require certainty, just reasonable probability of competitive harm. The extreme premium Adobe offered was itself evidence they valued removing competition more than acquiring assets. The outcome validates the analysis, but even if Figma had struggled, preserving the possibility of competition has value beyond any single company's success.
But now you are contradicting your initial argument. Here you say that the price offered by Adobe was astronomically high, and therefore an indicator that the offer was not legitimate, but initially you said that the FTC made the right decision because the offer was 3x lower than the IPO price.
No, the argument is that Adobe willing to pay a high price is a good signal that Figma was not a dice roll but actually worth much more than Adobe was willing to pay.
If it was known that Figma was worth more than Adobe was willing to pay, then why did Figma take the deal?
I think it's reasonable to formulate this as two outcomes (Figma independent and Figma bought by Adobe) and each firm's preferences. From Adobe's standpoint, outcome A has huge tail risk (Figma innovates and eats Adobe's business) so paying a lot for outcome B might be ok. From Figma's POV, they aren't really helped by that tail as much as Adobe is hurt by it (either way they're rich, unless they crash out and become poor), so Figma would love to play it safe and sell the tail gamble. Adobe is paying to buy the high tail and low tail from Figma, but Figma probably doesn't care too much about selling the high tail compared to selling the low tail; meanwhile Adobe mainly wants to buy the high tail. I think it's very reasonable for Adobe to value the high tail at much more than Figma values getting rid of the low tail (Adobe is willing to bid up aggressively while Figma is willing to offer down aggressively).
Whether the government saw Adobe's willingness to overpay for Figma as a signal of Adobe's underlying incentives (as in "I acquire Figma to keep my monopoly" and not "I acquire Figma to vertically integrate and make better product for consumer") seems much harder to speculate on. I didn't explain (nor do I think there's an obvious explanation) for why the original deal was at the high price rather than the low price, but I'd imagine Figma would've been generally willing to sell for less than the price Adobe bid given Adobe was probably Figma's best customer for acquiry.
But high IPO prices is evidence against the idea that Adobe was willing to overpay for Figma due to downside risk to Adobe that is not matched by upside benefit to Figma!
Obviously the die game is a simplified stylized example. Yes, I agree, that chance that Figma stock was worth literally zero (above what was paid) was less than 50%. But the point is that there was obviously risk that Figma would be worth less than $20B, otherwise Figma wouldn't have wanted to take the deal.
I think the flaw here would be to assume that there's such a great chance (roll 1 -3) of it being worthless. Figma, while not being a mature 20+ year old company, had long since established its place in the market.
There’s a lot of people I’ve talked to who didn’t like Lina Khan not because of the Figma thing but because they thought she was having a chilling effect on acquisitions broadly.
The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit. That’s because the bar for IPO has risen so high that only massive already incumbent unicorns can reach it. IPO isn’t a way to raise capital to compete. It’s a victory lap if you’ve won already.
Don’t know if this is actually true, that she was having this chilling effect. I am relaying a sentiment I’ve encountered.
Of course the other reason is tech-right echo chamber brain rot. People need to get off Xhitter. (Not a fan of doomer left anti tech brain rot either. There’s more than one kind of brain rot around.)
> The vast majority of startups will never IPO. Acquisition is the only viable exit.
Or you could run the business profitably and not exit at all.
Hard to raise money with that plan. The VC world wants the 10x. Difference between SME and Startup.
Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though.
It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance.
Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?
I agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone.
I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.
It's never made sense for me (as a gay man) how a gay man could get sucked into the fringe alt right manosphere. That whole ecosystem is antithetical to you
It makes perfect sense if you think about it from Thiel's perspective. Other than legal technicalities like marriage, the consequences of being gay are mainly determined by societal attitudes and not electoral politics. No legal changes that the Republicans would make do anything to stop a powerful billionaire from being openly gay. So it makes perfect sense that he would favor his business interests when he takes sides in politics.
I mean, these people aren't well my guy. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a bunch of repressed self-loathing around one's identity being at or near the core of it.
Thiel grew up in the 90s. Whatever one deems the tolerance situation today, it was worse then.
More like the 80s but true. Also maybe worth remembering that Thiel was outed by Gawker. He didn't come out as gay of his own volition and perhaps never would have.
[flagged]
That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own).
Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say.
Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.
It just happened with Windsurf and Google.
Windsurf getting "bought" such that the employees got nothing is a great recent example of why you want Lina Khan seeing to it that a healthy and well-regulated M&A market is in effect. That's precisely the kind of lowbrow shit you can thank her bought and paid for successors for bringing you the next decade's worth of.
So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?
Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?
> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?
What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring.
> Isn’t that the same thing
Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring".
And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.
It wasn’t an acquisition - Google offered the employees they wanted a shit ton of cash to leave.
What laws keep companies from hiring people they want to hire who are legally allowed to work in the country?
This is exactly what Google did, it hired employees.
This wasn't an acquisition, but it was really close to one. Whether or not the laws cover it right now, expanding acquisition laws into hiring out the core of a company would not be a big expansion. It wouldn't be a sea change in what types of hiring the FTC has control over.
So now you want companies to seek government approval before they can hire a certain number of people from a company? What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?
Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want the government to restrict who can be hired from a company or better yet, whether employees can accept better offers from another company? That’s only the other side of the coin of restricting employee movement based on non competes.
> seek government approval before
There's a neighboring comment that used almost the exact same wording that I already replied to.
In short: No.
> What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?
Is your startup like 10 people? Worth much less than a billion dollars? Then it's not big enough to be a problem.
So what laws do you suggest that the government pass that both stop Google from offering me a highly skilled and sought after AI professional (not really, we are speaking hypothetically) or my team and don’t suppress my ability to make as much money as the market will give me?
They can give just you a job at any time.
But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.
So they just give me a job as the leader, then other people want to follow. Is it them illegal for Google to offer other former coworkers a job? Isn’t that kind of like the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”?
So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off?
Am I paying more for search today because of the monopoly? Am I paying more for any of the free stuff that Google has because of advertising (that I block anyway)?
In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
Just offering normal jobs would generally be fine, doing a big group deal that also comes with IP licensing would generally not be fine.
I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.
> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?
> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?
That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.
So the law is now that they can’t license the technology to companies that higher former employees?
You don’t see what kind of Kafkaesque mess these proposed laws are creating?
Who are we benefiting again?
The benefit is the same kind as from blocking a very small fraction of acquisitions. If you don't think the existing rules there are kafkaesque, then the small expansion shouldn't be a huge change. If you do, I'm not the person to argue with.
And these rules would very rarely come into effect.
It’s the same for who? The employees? The company that is not allowed to make money by licensing it technology?
If you don't understand why acquisitions might be blocked and the benefit of it then I'm not going to be the one to explain it.
I'm not here to defend the entire edifice of the FTC having control over acquisitions. I'm here to say that when they have that control, it should also include almost-but-not-quite-acquisitions.
But you aren’t arguing about acquisitions. You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.
You specifically said that in some cases if a company hired employees it should then be prevented from licensing the technology
And still haven’t given a good reason why it shouldn’t.
The “bad” acquisition is usually considered Instagram . But who cares if a toxic social media site acquires another one? Who was harmed?
I'm saying that what google did is effectively an acquisition except it broke the equity and it avoided regulation.
You keep making examples that are less clear-cut, but whatever I agree there are things a company can do that aren't effectively acquisitions. I'm not saying how to write the rule, I'm just saying google is on the wrong side.
> You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.
They're totally allowed to acquire the company... as long as the FTC doesn't say no. And they can do lots of those other things too.
I don't know how you got the impression that I think acquisitions should be blocked more than a fraction of a percent of the time.
Even further, google SHOULD have acquired the company instead of doing what they did.
The FTC caused this issue with over regulation and by creating an environment of fear that every acquisition is going to be scrutinized.
Google had no fiduciary duty to do what’s in the best interest of WindSurf’s investors.
Google had every right to give the WindSurf employees offers to leave. The employees had every right to accept the offers. There is no world where the government should have been involved in that part.
At that point, the Windsurf equity owners had two choices - either not license or license.
Which part should have been illegal? The FTC could have said “Google you can’t both get the employees and license the IP”. Google would have said “fine, we will just hire the talent and have them create something similar”. Windsurf would have been worse off.
Alternatively, Google could license the technology. Then the employees could say I would rather just work for Google. Would you then be okay with enforcing non competes even though they are currently illegal in California?
There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
We actually saw something like that happen between Microsoft and OpenAI during the Altman fiasco. Microsoft had already licensed the technology and Altman was going to go to Microsoft and take OpenAI’s best people with him. Should the government have stepped in then and told Microsoft they can’t hire OpenAI employees?
> The FTC caused this issue with over regulation and by creating an environment of fear that every acquisition is going to be scrutinized.
Ridiculous. They intervene so rarely, even at the peak.
> Which part should have been illegal?
Not my problem to solve. Ever heard of "structuring" though? It's not unsolvable.
> There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.
If doing an actual acquisition would have been allowed, that would have been better for them.
If it wouldn't have been allowed, then yes the hypothetical law is worse for them but it's an acceptable loss. Sorry you can't use a workaround to get the benefit of an illegal deal.
You still didn’t answer the question. Do you want to make it illegal for:
1. Google to hire the employees and force the employees to stay at the company and how?
2. Google to be able to hire the employees and then Windsurf not be allowed to license their IP to a company who is willing to give them a bunch of money?
The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
Or in Figma/Adobe’s case. What if Adobe just said, Forget it, we will pay all of the developers we want a shit ton of money (less than $20 billion) to rebuild the entire application from scratch and leave the auxiliary staff behind. Would you also outlaw that?
In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
> You still didn’t answer the question. Do you want to make it illegal for:
Perhaps telling Google they can do one or the other but not both. Or not both unless they want to treat it like an acquisition.
Again I'm taking it as a given that it's fine to restrict company actions. If you dislike that entire concept then take it up with the people that put FTC in charge of acquisitions, not me. Not every willing transaction should be legal.
> The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.
Only if they allow this to succeed. If they slap it down then no company will attempt it again. They'll just file for acquisition.
> What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?
I refuse. You're asking an unreasonable amount of detail from me.
> Figma/Adobe’s case
If they want to make individual job offers and not try to negotiate group things or talk to figma at all then they can go ahead and try.
I'd be surprised if they didn't already do that.
> In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?
Even with the risk of corruption I prefer regulating acquisitions to allowing everything.
It's not about restrictions on hiring, you keep repeating that even though no one has advanced that proposal in the whole thread. You have absolutely crushed that strawman argument, congratulations.
It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historically been kept out of the courts for the most part because for the most part it has been in everyone's interests to keep the wheels greased on this (you'll notice old school VCs like Khosla are against fucking around in it in public forums).
Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal. At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".
If the trend becomes to just dissolve a startup the minute its worth anything and immediately partition it into exactly the pieces a giant company wants and zero out everyone else, this will have a massively destabilizing effect on a historical engine of innovation (see: OGs are against it on Twitter).
And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.
Stop talking about the government restricting hiring, no one said that.
The government caused the problem in the first place by making it harder for big companies to acquire smaller companies.
> It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity"
An employer has never had “property rights” to decide where I can and can’t work.
> Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal
The CEO while working for the company has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. But doesn’t have the responsibility not to leave if another company offers it more money or if other employees that like the CEO, they are free to reach out to the CEO and leave too.
> At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".
“Equity” in startups have always statistically been fools gold between dilution, preferred shares, etc.
> But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something"*
See previous comments about only the naive or true believers (but I repeat myself they are one in the same) are naive enough to believe in anything promised or implied by startups more than you will get paid X amount in cash for hours you work (and sometimes not even that).
> And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.
So the solution is for the government to pass more laws to fix the problems that the regulations it already put in place caused?
The property rights in question are the rights of the people who hold equity in the company. The legally unclear part because of inadequate precedent to know how a given case would be adjudicated in a given jurisdiction is what exactly "equity" means in the context of employee ownership in a technology startup (which gets different treatment of e.g. taxes and amortization schedules, "tech" is treated differently by the law in some ways that are crystal clear and in other ways that are less clear).
No one has proposed that anyone be barred from taking an offer of employment (that I've seen and interpreted that way anyways), that would be extremely unpopular with just about everyone.
What people are talking about is whether or not founders and VCs can de facto sell a company in terms of the real assets that people care about without distributing the proceeds to shareholders via a legal fiction that the one company disappeared (was written down or otherwise disposed of) and tada over here some job offers and other compensation appeared in just that amount but for a different group of people.
This is a plot device in the Sorkin film about Facebook. They're in Thiel's office getting the new investment and the numbers guy is like "we're going to get you clean paperwork in Delaware" and Thiel looks up: "So who, exactly, is Eduardo Saverin?" I very much doubt the movie was a terribly accurate portrayal, but that's the TLDR for lay people: one company vanishes, another appears with the same assets, but different ownership.
Trying to make this about the federal government telling people they can't work for Google is bad faith. Stop with that shit.
The founders are employees too. Should they not be allowed to leave a company because they are founders? The entire scenario is that the investors aren’t getting anything because the company isn’t being acquired and the employees are being “poached”.
The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
In the hypothetical lawsuit the damages would be money, the defendants would be the founders and investors, and the plantiffs would be employees with grants that got written down. No one knows how such a lawsuit would play out because it hasn't happened and looks unlikely to.
For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them owing money to former employees.
Enough with this, it's trolling at this point.
Okay, so I am founder of the company, I get VC funding. But I’m not “rich” by any means since I only have the play play wealth based on illiquid “equity”. I may not even have control over the company any more after much dilution.
I get an offer from Google where I am now making real money and have liquid RSUs coming. You think other employees should have the right to sue me because I left the company for a better offer?
The investors aren’t getting anything, in this case Google didn’t acquire the company, they hired the employees. Why would the investors be sued because employees left?
No, it really isn't. It's not remotely the FTCs job to regulate that type of thing, and I really don't think you would want it to be. Would you rather have a system where competing companies have to get government approval before extending offers to you? You know who would love that system? Google.
> have to get government approval before
That is not the only form of regulation, and not the form that would be applied here. This would be after the fact, going after companies that try to pull things like this.
But companies should be able to pull things like this. If a company isn't paying market rate I see no problem with a competitor destroying it by hiring away all its best employees.
If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem.
In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.
There was no world where Windsurf was going to challenge Google and the same is true for the examples.
These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.
Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.
> These were regular old job offers.
They were not.
> Google didn’t want the “assets”.
They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.
You think Google could have but didn't acquire Windsurf, and instead hired away the top talent and discarded the rest because of regulatory scrutiny?
Is there any proof of this at all?
Having criticized a lot of her tenure (and still do!), Lina's problem was never whether she was right or not.
It's that she was incredibly ineffective.
Of course she was right. That's what made her practical ineffectiveness so problematic.
She was often 100% right on what should be done but could only achieve 0-10% of it.
I'd rather have someone who is 70% right on what should be done, but can achieve almost all of it, as some previous FTC chairs were.
Why do you think she was ineffective?
Even this one victory (and it was more than one) is one more than the fucking nothing we're getting on pushback from the SEC to the FDA to the FCC and back again now: this is #CrimeSeason baby (or so its called on Twitter), oligarchs in the front row and all. The last 3 administrations have been soft on FAANG and its going really badly.
The argument that she had the correct agenda, won a few, lost most to a captured judiciary (correct me if I'm mis-characterizing your position) is probably the stupidest thing I've seen on one of the dumbest threads in recent memory.
Can you clarify where I've lost the plot with your argument and restore some of my sorely tested faith in humanity?
> The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead.
Blocking the merger was good. But I'm not convinced the IPO was good. I think trying to be a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars is only going to make Figma worse. I care about the users more than the people that got rich.
I mean the bigger problem with the IPO was that they opened at a 20b valuation and by the end of the day a bunch of investors got richer than anyone who built anything because the investment bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies
> bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies
Small float, big hype, litterally designed to pump the stock on the float.
1.2bn was raised - of which only 0.8bn was cashing out existing shareholders - all the other investors got the pump as planned all for the low price of $1.6bn.
Basically the existing shareholders got watered down by ~5% and the value of the shares they still hold are 3x and now liquid, better than they got in any of the vc funding rounds.
The lashing she gets around here is disturbing.
The last time we came down this hard on one of the few diligent, competent, agressive, uncorrupted regulators with a weird mixture of old boys club sexism and tribal spinal reflex gang flag posturing was in 1996 give or take when Rubin, Greenspan, and Summers came after Brooksley Born as the Chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and forced her out via bunch of irregularities and other scandal-worthy maneuver.
Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology).
If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO.
God knows what the price will be this time.
> If you care about market cap? She was right.
None of the FTC's business
> If you care about employee comp? She was right.
None of the FTC's business
> Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.
None of the FTC's business x3
> If you care about consumer choice, she was right.
Ok, so this is the FTC's business. But does Figma compete with Adobe in any major areas? I'm not aware of any major Adobe products like that.
> > Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right.
> None of the FTC's business x3
> > If you care about consumer choice, she was right.
> Ok, so this is the FTC's business.
You don't think there's relationship between consumer choice and a large number of acquirers? These are basically equivalent statements, they're both saying "markets remain competitive".
This is an account not yet three weeks old on a rampage of low-effort shouting about why institutions, honesty, integrity, standards and decency are pointless, counterproductive, and stupid.
I think it might be an alt for Peter Thiel himself! We're in the presence of greatness friend, we should just lean back and be enlightened.
Only in the case where both the acquirer and the target have directly competing products, which is why I specifically mentioned that case and said it would be the FTCs business. (And even then sometimes it doesn't. Google bought Waze, which was a direct competitor to Google Maps, but still both products exist.)
And, no, they aren't remotely equivalent statements to each other or to "markets remain competitive." If there are 100 products in a market, and an acquisition reduces that to 99, it will have no effect on the competitiveness of a market, which is why such an acquisition is not typically any of the FTC's business.
No, that's just wrong, if you let Adobe buy up all the design tools then you limit designer's choice to just Adobe. Will they come out with a competing product? Maybe. That's their business. But the potential is there, and Adobe has to stay on its toes and can't coast on it's near-monopoly status. Indeed, it's now also possible Figma will come out with products to compete with Adobe. And just the threat of that has the potential to limit all of the hostile behavior towards consumers Adobe has been up to for years.
Which is all to say that the market remains competitive.
If you don't think it's the FTC's business to decide whether or not that 100 to 99 move is significant, then I don't think you understand. Even if it's insignificant - it's their business to make that call. You can disagree with it, but if you think that isn't their balliwick, you're simply mistaken.
Hypothetical future competing products is a ridiculous standard. By that logic the FTC could block anything because the acquirer could always in some hypothetical future be a competitor.
It's ridiculous to suggest corporations will treat their customers better if they have competition? That if their customers have somewhere else to go they have more negotiating power?
Adobe and Figma are competitors, right now, regardless of whether they have product lines in direct competition, at this moment.
No they aren't. Having product lines in direct competition is the fundamental definition of being a competing business.
I doubt their executives agree that one another are not a competitive threat. They wouldn't have tried to merge if they weren't playing ball in the same court.
But what if you care about Adobe? Booooo Hooooo!!! ;( /s
It doesn't prove it. Khan attempted very fiercely to block Amazon's purchase of iRobot and she, along with the EU authorities, succeeded in preventing it and now iRobot is about to file bankruptcy. We don't have the counterfactual and founders (nor regulatory agencies) can see the future.
Someone made a good analogy on twitter that Khan essentially cut off a genius pianist's right hand, the pianist persevered and somehow succeeded in retaining their talent in spite of having one hand, and now Khan is taking credit for the feat. In the same way, the fact that Figma still exists is not proof that she was right.
IPOs are a really tough path, and can significantly alter the business. I'd hesitate to hold up the big one for this year as vindication for her entire approach. The vast majority of growth tech companies are not going to go public, but need to release value for investors and employees, and PE or acquisition is the only path open to them. If you've ever had experience with PE you might not want to deal with that, and getting bought is all that's left if you owe people a big return soon.
Sure, and a counter-argument of the form "acquisitions from such valuation to such valuation were down such percent, we interviewed the following founders and these Corp Dev lawyers spoke on the condition of anonymity..." would be an interesting one. But AFAICT at everything but Goliath scale, M&A was actually up over the period.
So as usual here we are with the epic showdown of Data and Vibes...and in an obvious landslide Vibes takes it home.
It wasn’t the outcome, it was the bad reasoning and the overall desire for interference
Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not. Khan just needs a poster child for her overall intervention philosophy.
Pointing at Figma as a success for her overall world view is like the religious who say “oh god saved me from that flood” while ignoring the hundreds who did die. The Almighty wanted them to die? Or…?
If you’re gonna claim the successes you have to claim the failures
> Does it really matter if Figma was bought vs IPO? No of course not.
I think it matters. Look what happened when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. The innovative product (Fireworks) that brought many (but not all) many of the innovations that would later come in Sketch and then Figma was left to slowly die because it competed with their flagship product (Photoshop). That delayed innovation in that market segment by around a decade.
Fireworks was great when I was a young teen and first learning the difference vector graphics could make.
Let’s not forget our beloved Flash, who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.
I almost never see anyone mention Macromedia in relation to Flash these days, almost as if history has rewritten it to an Adobe thing.
> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues.
Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually.
The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its execution model was.
It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.
From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.
From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.
It doesn't matter per se if Figma is bought instead of an IPO. It does matter that Adobe was about to pay about one third the fair market price of Figma, and she successfully stopped this market manipulation.
If there are no failures how can you claim them?
What failures, exactly?
What failures? Tech has been Godzilla stomping every conceivable obstacle to total world domination. Its like half the fucking stock market.
Someone caught a shooting star in the palm of their hand one time and this happened.
What are you talking about?
One way to settle the question of whether Khan is right would be for the government to simply make competing offers in these situations, buy the companies, and shepherd them to IPO, or a buyer with fewer antitrust issues if that's not possible.
If the government is net ahead after a decade or so, then we'd know.
This approach to antitrust wouldn't work in cases like the Apple case, where the power is worth it to the company only because they can misuse it, but it would be a very fair and accounting-transparent remedy for the "startup gets bought by competitor" case.
This is a terrible idea. The government should not be in the business of buying large pre-IPO companies.
There is no need to bikeshed a new solution here. Antitrust law solves this just fine, as exemplified by this case.
We've got an awful lot of history on the periods in which serious regulators without perverse incentives attached to revolving door industry jobs competently and diligently refereed markets, and when big business has been successful in achieving what I downthread called "Goldilocks" regulation: just enough friction to new entrants, plenty of pliant former and future employees doing regulation in the interests of the established players.
We've got a lot of history on what happens when technology is acknowledged as a natural monopoly and guided through it's development, evolution, and dissemination through society for the global welfare: that's the entire 20th century friend: the transistor, the Internet, the laser, fucking Velcro.
We're living through a time when that treasure trove of public wealth (paid for by taxpayers) is getting captured up by a caricature of gilded age kleptocracy at the front row of the fucking Inaugeration.
We know what the outcomes are. I don't know why people who hang out on Hacker News are fighting the data on this tooth and nail. Maybe it's because Trump threw her out, maybe it's because they own a bunch of NVIDIA stock and like the status quo, I don't know.
The outcomes are not in fucking dispute in this case or the macro situation.
Terrible terrible idea with incredible potential for corruption and theft of public funds.
> design tools market stays competitive
Adobe killed their Figma competitor (XD), so the reality of the UI design tools niche in the design tools market is that Figma actually has a near monopoly. Sketch still chugs along, but its market share is negligible. Penpot is a neat idealistic community effort that is lightyears behind.
This is one of the reasons why Figma continues to tighten the screws on their userbase, who doesn't like it one bit, but continues to pay.
Now, this is all not to say, that it would've been any better with Adobe's involvement, more like lamenting the fact that Figma lived long enough to become a villain.
Figma has a near monopoly because it built the better product. This is the preferred outcome compared to Adobe broadening their monopoly not by building a better product, but just by acquiring/squashing their competition.
Monopolies aren't illegal. Preventing competition is the thing we want to stop. As far as I can see, Figma doesn't do anything to give themselves an unfair advantage or prevent other players from entering the market.
Figma had 8 funding rounds in 10 years, according to crunchbase. That is an advantage compared to other players on the market that do not receive VC. If it's fair or not, that’s up to everyones own standards.
It’s fair, because they earned it by building the best offering on the market.
Fairness doesn’t mean everyone gets funded regardless of their quality.
You do not "receive" VC, you sell shares (and control). You write as if it's some sort of grant that Figma uniquely got access to.
I think the more common term is to "raise money". But at the end, you receive money that you should spend. With strings attached, of course. That’s the nature of VC.
Yes but that's pretty common and in no way an unfair advantage.
Should the other players not have also raised VC money if it was such a differentiating advantage? Perhaps they should have sold even more equity than Figma did and raised more money if that would have been the difference maker.
Figma is also a company that starts with an "F". Whether thats fair or not is up to everyone's standards.
Adobe is in maintenance mode. They aren't willing to compete with figma because they have basically never had to compete with anyone since the 90s. They forgot how
Adobe would have killed one product regardless. If they had been allowed to acquire Figma, they might have killed the better one.
I don't see why the market cap proves whether she is correct or not. You'd have to compare it to the counter-factual of what the value of a Figma subsidiary would be under Adobe today.
This is not obvious at all to me. Instagram (bought for $1B) is probably worth ~700 B of Meta's market cap.
PSA that no regulator simply means the sharkest shark regulates. There is no such thing as no regulator. People will regulate. The question is who and how
What does this mean? If there is no regulator, someone else will use force to prevent voluntary mutually beneficial deals from taking place?
It means that markets organize somehow. Even black markets in prison have rules (and for all I know, sensible ones under the circumstances). The drug trade has rules and norms.
Cartels form and collude, the JP Morgans or Goulds of the world see excessive competition next to their neat steel or railroad trusts and decide to organize it. And sometimes this can even be an improvement (those old telephone poles with like 90 separate junctions just got too tall to be safe!)
But on average, the public would like (or should want) a say in how markets are organized, because it is both possible and lucrative to induce market failure. Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Markets are inevitable (try to stop them forming if you don't believe me), but market failures are generally not inevitable, they are generally the result of poorly refereed markets.
My definition of this (which apparently I'm now trying to popularize) is "power can never be destroyed, only moved".
If we destroy an entity that has power, the power goes someplace else and in the case of (democratic) government entities, it rarely ends up someplace better for us regular folks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you arguing that breaking up monopolies takes power away from consumers?
I think GP is saying that nature abhors a vacuum in human affairs as well as in physics: the question isn't whether or not there's going to be a government or a currency or a regulatory climate.
The question is whether those things are going to be determined at a polling place by voters or in a smoke-filled room by gangsters.
I would have gone with corporation instead of gangster, but yes, exactly.
People so often rail against a government telling them they can't do something but so rarely justify they would be able to do it if the government was destroyed.
Who said I had anything against gangsters? ;)
But lets call it what it is: when a bunch of made men see a power vacuum and set up an informal clique with its own rules and loyalty tests while protesting "just a merchant nothing to see here"?
Thats like, the entry for gangster on the Wiki for the Sopranos.
> Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Well, yes. But that does seem to gloss over the important part which is how they do it - hiring lobbyists and influencing the official regulators. If the frame is that someone is going to be the most powerful force in the market then sure, but the government setting it to be a particular body by fiat just creates a ripe target for corruption.
The history of the tech industry has been one of where if left to their own devices coders would create a thriving and tolerant software ecosystem and the main thing stopping them has been IP law. And a secondary thing stopping them has been government pressure (there has been a bit of a spasm recently because of the aftereffects of, effectively, systems set up to support things like Operation Choke Point, for example).
Assuming some semblance of the rule of law, Google & friends ultimately can't stop someone competing with them unless the government is active in the space the space too. More formal regulation is probably just going to cement their position further.
Time and again people make the utterly unsubstantiated claim that attack dog regulators like Lina Khan are actually good for big business and bad for the small guy.
Year after year, big business lobbies, bribes, cajoles, blackmails, whatever it takes to get rid of attack dog regulators like Lina Khan.
I'm sorry friend, history does not say what you think it does. History says that good outcomes come from either brutally regulated monopolies (ATT / Western / the Labs), public/private partnerships (DoD funding the Internet, basically every major innovation we coast on today), and busting the fucking chops of mega-trusts (JP Morgan, Gould, steel, railroads, telegraph, it goes on and on).
Why does big business hate aggressive regulation if it's "actually good for them"?
They like a Goldilocks regulation, a little friction to new entrants, a lot of discretion in the hands of pliant former industry people.
They hate Lina Khan.
If they hate Lina Khan, it's because she's liable to make demands on them without knowing anything about their business. In the worst case, her office turns outright extortionist, as the current administration is bent on demonstrating.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
False, wrong, mistaken, and other balderdash.
They don't have anything against regulators and they certainly don't have anything against dumb regulators.
They've got a little red laser dot on the forehead of regulators who don't want a payday after a term of "public service".
"Because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private sectors payoff down the road. But I'm not looking, and by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, they'll be ruined."
- Chrisjen Avasarala
https://youtu.be/yBFJGz5P_G8
That may all be true but I don't see how it relates. Adobe can't prevent figma from going public if it refuses their offer. It's an open market. Nothing stops new competitors from joining.
Only regulators have absolute power in this regard. I'd prefer decentralized power
Preferring decentralized power is like preferring decreasing entropy, who wouldn't want that but it's almost never going to happen, and even local, temporary instances of such are miracles of nature meriting arbitrary study.
It's concerning that you don't see this, but makes no difference to how the world works.
That is one of the possible outcomes right? Producers have an incentive to collude and not compete with one another. They could create a consortium to fix prices, and use tactics such as acquisitions or _dissuasion_ to prevent new, more efficient competitors from undercutting their prices, thus distorting a free market equilibrium.
The consortium creates an oligopoly which prevents mutually beneficial deals that would have otherwise taken place in a regulated competitive free market between consumers and producers.
If there is no regulator, the company with the most money will use its money to prevent any deals that are inconvenient for it from taking place. Often those would be beneficial to the other parties or to the consumers.
Maybe it's not a great choice of words to say here "the large company regulates the space" but it's definitely a problem worth pointing out.
Yes. For example, Apple has complete control over their App Store. It's essentially a small economy in which they are the government, and it's a market they regulate with an iron fist. Because OUR regulators won't.
But they're dictators. There's no democracy, there's no voting, and Apple does whatever it feels is best for them. Just like a dictator would run their country.
There's plenty of mutually beneficial arrangements that Apple unilaterally struck down because they want to maintain their stranglehold on the market.
I think that's what the comment meant. Take it metaphorically
I cannot understanding your argument at all.
If you eliminate formal regulators (rules, laws, authoritative bodies), you haven't eliminated regulation or governance. Instead, informal forms of power take over—those who are most forceful, persuasive, or socially connected regulate what happens. This is the "tyranny of structurelessness": when no open, accountable structures exist, structure remains—it just becomes invisible, unaccountable, and often dominated by the "sharkest shark."
So, "no regulator" doesn't mean freedom from regulation; it means the emergence of undemocratic, unchecked power by whoever can grab and wield it.
I find people tend to get it when you raise cases of market activity outside the law: everyone knows the mob buys and sells things but there are still rules.
> This is exactly why we need regulators willing to tell Big Tech "no" sometimes.
At some point, "Big Tech" is really "Big Finance" in disguise.
If I suggest putting your net worth on black at roulette and it lands on black, does that make my advice right?
Khan forced the employees and investors to continue working and gambling on a company they might not have wanted to continue working for or gambling on. It doesn't really matter that the gamble succeeded in this case.
I'm pretty sure no employee wants to work for Adobe.
I'm sympathetic to a prohibition on big companies buying their competitors, but a 3x difference over two years seems too low to suggest that antitrust creates more pure business value.
First this is all hindsight now. We don't know the probabilities of this outcome vs. others. Figma's shareholders didn't at the time, which is why they chose to sell. Khan didn't either.
Second, 3x over two years isn't that much. There must be many opportunities in SV for all of Figma's employees and investors that could have given them a much higher return than that with much less risk.
I don't have this data, but one could look at secondary sales in the past two years as a measure of the increased risk and opportunity cost, right?
Any delay of people getting liquid impacts the creation of other startups, both by the Figma people who can now leave and do their own thing and for the companies Figma stakeholders would have invested in . This is super hard to measure but it is the kind of thing markets are good at measuring when they ask shareholders "sell now to Adobe or wait to IPO?"
This seems really good for Figma users, most of all. Most of the value destroyed by the acquisition would have been in the distortion and likely ultimate destruction of a company culture that made an insanely good product.
But those people are capable of going and making new products, and maybe Figma at its current phase is now too boring a thing for their talents, and should be managed by a more boring organization staffed by people who are slightly less able to make another Figma.
Who knows, but I doubt Khan (or any one individual or organization) is in a better position to assess the optimal delivery of what people want than the incentivized distributed intelligence of all the stakeholders and the people and markets around them.
Again, there are other reasons to do this that markets wouldn't quantify.
The lengths people will go to to avoid the facts on this are fucking remarkable. I'll let Opus explain:
"The Bottom Line
A 73% annualized return would:
Such returns are typically only achieved during: While spectacular, returns of this magnitude are extremely difficult to sustain and often involve significant risk."Then why did shareholders choose to sell?
In choosing to sell they decided the risk wasn't worth the reward.
If you were in their position, would you have sold or held?
Maybe they thought an IPO wasn’t going to happen because the market would be in bad shape or there would be too much regulation there.
Maybe they were seeing the AI boom on the horizon and wanted the capital out now to deploy there. They wanted to chase AI not hodl some “old” pre-AI thing. A lot of people think AI is going to render the entire process of which Figma has become a key part obsolete. (I don’t.)
Those are two things I can think of to explain this behavior.
Also some people like to get out when they’re ahead. “The world is full of rich people who sold too soon, not rich people who sold too late.” This makes sense if you are generally pessimistic, which many are for various reasons.
The shareholders chose to sell because it was a decent/OK deal for everyone other than the users of the software/society at large.
I have no idea why they agreed to the deal, one imagines a bunch of competing interests ranging from late D, E, F+ round holders, to founders, to influential employees. By the time a company is selling to a mega-conglomerate (in effect, a holding company) for 20 billion dollars it's pretty hard to un-grind the sausage on how a bunch of competing incentives got resolved.
As a founder? Obviously I hold unless I know something is rotten in Denmark and it's about to collapse like a Michael Siebel sale to Autodesk. Are you kidding? I've got a startup so successful that I'm already a billionaire and my choices are:
- let it ride, be a star, chart my own course - go work for fucking Adobe lol
Yeah, easy one.
If I'm an early VC or a limited partner with some structural reason to need the cash before some accounting period ends or something? Maybe I want the sale. Maybe I own a bunch of Adobe stock and I want the consolidation. Maybe a lot of things.
Don't know why the deal got agreed to pending regulator approval. If I'm an already richer-than-God founder, or an employee who can either get full value for my shares or get Windsurf'd in some preference shenanigans, or most anyone else involved? Then fuck Adobe.
On the flip side Khan was wrong about iRobot. The results were layoffs at iRobot and now Roombas are made by a Chinese ODM.
As is the case with many startups, especially those with a limited product portfolio, it's rare for them to exceed their IPO valuation in the future. So, I think we'll have to wait and see if Figma can continue its growth.
the only thing I will refute is the $60Bn market cap is due to IPO. Once they start reporting earnings, in a year or two once the hype dies down we will find the true value.
a lot of tech darlings have been decimated by the stock market. & Adobe can still buy them once they're public, maybe even cheaper than $20bn.
It's 43 already. Let's look at their first quarterly call.