It's of course understandstable that the founding team would take the exit. The fact that they have the strongest & most technologically advanced product, loved universally by designers and software engineers alike, only makes it more devastating.
Adobe is down $40B in market cap. Some of that maybe to related to overall market weakness like FedEx and inflation, but it feels like shareholders value Figma at $0 and that this is a $20B write down??
Not really. I’m an engineer and worked closely with designers for the bulk of my career. I’ve been spoiled with much better communication processes and mediums. I’ve shipped UI widgets to core libraries of Amazon and Google, none of it needed Figma.
The Figma product itself is slow, and has usability issues, which is ironic. The CSS box model, for example, is a 90% approximation. It is an improvement over Sketch, but these tools when viewed as a designer/engineer communication medium is not a necessity. Designers would also be fine in not web adapted tools. I’ve found Storybook to be a much better protocol to match impedance between design and engineering, but that requires an org with UX developers (a designer who can produce working CSS and HTML).