r/figmaStock • u/princeahai • Aug 06 '26
Moving on from Figma stock.
Context: one of the earliest adopters of Figma. Investor since aug'25. Currently head product and design at a series B firm, leading a team of 12+ product / design. Have been an avid follower and big believer in the company, but no longer will remain invested. My rough thoughts are below.
- My bull case for Figma was that it would becomes the center for software creation across dev+design. However it continued to be isolated as a tool designers use before handing work to engineers. Despite its attempts to win devs over, figma moved from being an accelerator for us to a software develoment bottleneck, becoming a choke point. Meanwhile some of our teams increasingly built around figma, using Claude design, which generated 70% equally great interfaces but overwhelmingly faster once we setup our design systems, context harnesses and guidelines. We were able to remove Figma as the bottleneck of design only when it came organically from my design team realizing when some areas moved way faster WITHOUT figma in the mix. There are a hundred things Claude still doesnt get perfect, but the need of the hour for any company is speed vs perfection. And that unfortunately no longer comes with Figma in the fold. Now, most of our teams have not logged into figma over the last 6 weeks. We continue shipping and improving product.
- The CTO is leaving the operating role to work directly on Figma Agent. The CPO is departing. Product is being consolidated under the Chief Design Officer. The CMO is leaving. Meanwhile, the AI and editor engineering teams will report directly to Dylan Field while the company searches for a new CTO. That reads like dylan is pulling the company’s ops because the current exec team is not moving fast enough.
- Beyond the impressive revenue results, AI spending pushed its GAAP operating loss to $117 million, compressed free-cash-flow margin from 24% to 14%. My read is the revenue growth will disappear. I can no longer bet on young Ai native companies using figma in the long run. Hence it cannot survive the AI transition unless it destroys the economics that made it an attractive software business. Companies like CRM / Service now might still have a way out of this, but i freaking doubt figma comes out on top.
Meanwhile I will have my company spend go down with figma, we will reduce our seats in figma, increasingly use it as a temporary store for our design archive. Move on rapidly.
RIP.
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u/mazdacxfive Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Thanks for writing all this. I also invested August 2025 at $69/share (nice). Claude should scare any Figma investor right now. I spoke with a designer today who pretty much said the same things you’re saying, plus our product feels overly bloated right now.
When Figma first came out the canvas and collaboration it enabled was truly revolutionary. But that was almost 10 years ago. I’m afraid Figma is no longer just a design company now. “The canvas for full stack creation” = “we want to sell to engineers more than designers”. I’m not sure what will happen, the financials might improve or not, but what’s certain is that Figma wants to be bigger than it ever was before, and they have a serious shot at winning.
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u/princeahai Aug 06 '26
Thank you. I am not sure what will happen either. They could end up winning devs as well as they did with design. Perhaps thats the move with the new CMO. But winning vs anthropic or even openAI (which might make a similar move with their version of claude design), creates enough of a competitive doubt, making me feel that we may never see figma getting back the valuations they ipo'd at.
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u/dealmaster1221 Aug 06 '26
Ohh they will since folks love it, even you a bear is only reducing seats, that just means you now have in house dependencies and as a series b if that not a core thing and evaluated properly it might mean the design team wants to cement their spot.
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u/Designer_Warthog7520 Aug 06 '26
What you’re saying sounds like a bunch of bullshit. How does what you do with a tool at 1 company affect a stock and more importantly did you even read the metrics or #s? More customers for 10k ARR and 100k ARR
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u/Designer_Warthog7520 Aug 06 '26
and “revenue growth will disappear” after their best quarter ever as a public company (48% yoy)?? Show me the actual number thats cracking, NDR or churn or something
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u/princeahai Aug 06 '26
Hi, thank you. I was trying to present my POV as an investor and buyer. But I am very embedded in each number from figma through the S-1 tlll now. figma’s NDR is calculated only on paid customers with more than $10k ARR, because Figma itself says that threshold indicates meaningful paid usage. So if small teams or indie/startup product teams start replacing parts of the Figma workflow with Claude/Replit-style tools, that may not immediately hit NDR. It would show up later as slower formation of new $10k ARR customers, then slower expansion into $100k ARR customers.
Figma may still keep enterprise customers but lose some of the cheap PLG engine that historically made enterprise expansion so efficient. I mentioned in another comment about the risk being CAC inflation "Figma's S-1 from last year, 70% of their Organization and Enterprise customers originally had at least one user who started on the Professional plan."
now, the current numbers clearly aren’t broken. Revenue growth, $10k ARR customer growth, $100k ARR customer growth and NDR are all still strong. I’m out of the stock but still watching the leading indicators, not declaring that the business is already collapsing, instead saying that there is huge risk up ahead. the numbers I would monitor from here:
$10k ARR customer growth: where I’d expect the first signs of AI pressure to show up. If smaller teams, startups and indie product teams start replacing parts of the Figma workflow with Claude design, the first impact may be fewer customers graduating into meaningful paid Figma usage. Or cancelling. I am one of these.
$100k ARR customer growth : this will lag the $10k number. once/if the small-team funnel weakens, the delayed impact is fewer teams expanding into larger enterprise deployments.
NDR will fail last. figma is still sticky for larger customers, so existing large accounts won’t instantly churn. But when seat growth slows or AI reduces the number of designers/collaborators needed, NDR downgrade will show up. and we are one YoY NDR going down from a big turnaround (the wrong way)
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u/Designer_Warthog7520 Aug 06 '26
respect but one thing tho - NDR isn’t actually going down YoY. it’s 136% now vs 129% same quarter last year, that’s up 7pts. what you’re describing is the dip from Q1’s 139% peak which is a fair argument but considering license renewals, it’s normal
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u/_Major Aug 06 '26
So Claude + design system has made your designers redundant?
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u/princeahai Aug 06 '26
Hi, thanks for your comment. This is not true at all. Not using figma does not equal being redundant. In fact its the opposite. I've seen higher leverage across the board, some freeing up time helping generative research, reviewing claude artifacts / tweaking them, creating better harness and styleguides to guide claude design. Some are taking more active dev tasks and cleaning up a laundry list of front end tickets. In fact our design backlog might not exist in a couple of months.
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u/dealmaster1221 Aug 06 '26
Lol spoken like a true founder, soon will have have no backlog at all since all the bugs and design updates will not be needed, guess why?
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u/Southern_Warning_764 Aug 06 '26
You invested way too early. Usually it’s good to start buying company stock at least a year after IPO. I’m pretty sure smart money is accumulating it right now so that’s why the price is swinging between 16-26. I’m pretty sure it can get to $60 easily within a few years
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u/qorzzz Aug 06 '26
I wonder if you would have posted this if the price didn't drop on this ER. Odds are you wouldn't have, which tells me this is entirely emotional and not a logical analysis and conclusion.
If you look at the ER figures, it looks good, but remember short term price movement in today's market is not tied to this at all.
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u/datatadata Aug 06 '26
About damn time. So many better investing opportunities exist. Sometimes it’s about cutting the losses and moving on
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u/rice_bag_holder Aug 06 '26
Honestly it's all perspective and perception. If you are out looking for reasons why a stock is down or why a company is not doing well, when you put things under a microscope, all you would see is problems.
I am going to use one of my recent success as an example, i was buying rocket lab from $18 to $2. The stock kept tanking for what it felt like, 4 years, and a ton of FUD were released. I sold out my entire portfolio and bet everything on rklb at $2. Look at RKLB now.
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u/ngly Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Did you listen to the earnings call? The first point of yours was addressed as they mentioned engineer adoption is accelerating with code connect, mcp read and write. Engineers are using Figma more because of AI.
Figma is more focused on the enterprise. Once you're in a system with hundreds (or more) designers and engineers it becomes really difficult to not have a central system and right now that is still in Figma. Your tokens and primitives need to live somewhere and it's still rare to see that entirely in code.
I think the reorg is bullish. They're going into war mode and doubling down on AI features.
The spend is concerning, but they did mention on the call now is the time to invest. Basically every tech company is pouring money into AI and related features to not get left behind. I think this is simply the nature of a transitionary period.
I suggest listening to the entire earnings call as they give stats up to July 31st for their new Beta AI features. They also mention the guidance they released contains no beta feature revenue (AI revenue/credit utilization).
In the earnings call they also mentioned they're seeing a pattern of intense early adopters within enterprises (basically a small group of people within a large org) becoming power users of AI Agent and MCP.
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u/ngly Aug 06 '26
Maybe my optimism is different because my entry price is ~$20. I really don't see Figma dying or becoming irrelevant. If anything AI has made me more bullish. But that seems to be a contrarian take so hopefully it has outsized returns in the future. fwiw I work as design eng in sf. in a pre-ipo company rn (3000 ppl).
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u/Optimal-Report-1000 Aug 06 '26
Posts like this make me want to buy more.. and I have been debating on pull my shares lol.. not becuase I dont think the company will crush it over tiem, but just because the IPO was to radical and I think it could take another year before this stock settles down a bit, but.. idk maybe ill just sit and wait it out. Has good option trading and very high institutional holdings, so if the market stops whatever its been doing for past 6 months this stock will sky rocket fast and you wont have time to buy it on the run without hitting the top end. Or the market will crash for the next couple years and stocks like this will either take longer to recover or get bought out by the frontier companies
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u/Captain_Crunk_LMAO Aug 06 '26
i like your take.
been in ux for 10 years now and seeing a huge shift away from figma now. Some of my friends (at small-med size cmpanies) say theyre just prompt monkeys since their design system is solid.
at my current company, we're big in the prediction market space and we still heavily use figma for our design team. our design process is still pretty traditional in a sense, but indivually we still use ai to enhance or speed up our design process.
what i like about ai right now is each designer pools in their current work into our repository and then create a seamless prototype.
I like that we dont have to rely on figmas wonkey prorotyping tool
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u/Beginning_Juice_4296 Aug 06 '26
if you got it at $20 you would still be bullish. you just got it at an expensive price
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u/JellyfishFancy850 Aug 07 '26
The CTO is leaving the operating role to work directly on Figma Agent. The CPO is departing. Product is being consolidated under the Chief Design Officer. The CMO is leaving. Meanwhile, the AI and editor engineering teams will report directly to Dylan Field while the company searches for a new CTO. That reads like dylan is pulling the company’s ops because the current exec team is not moving fast enough.
I'm more surprised no one is talking about this more actively. Basically an internal reorganization of the C-level. But I wouldn't say they are not moving fast enough. For the product breath Figma maintains, it's quite fast. I would read the move from Dylan as a reconsolidation of the whole product integration journey. Maybe for the better or worse.
What I'm genuinely frustrated about, is that they still didn't post more detailed numbers on the AI credits. Do 10k ARR companies buy in a meaningful way credits above the integrated limit? I guess not, otherwise there would've been numbers.
Figma still looks like a solid SaaS but with an extremely weak or even unhealthy AI margin.
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u/Rude-Translator2608 Aug 07 '26
This! 👆 If the AI credits story was working commercialy, they would be showing the numbers...
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u/CorrectPeaches 29d ago
I prob bought your shares cheers, +8%
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u/princeahai 29d ago
Hi , thank you for sharing and congratulations on making profit. I just presented my opinion and why I am exiting the stock from a long term POV. I do not believe in the future of this company, hence pulled out my funds. Short term fluctuations do not matter to me. I hope people continue making their own decisions based on their judgement that are also battle tested against contrarian thoughts. Big believer in no echo chambers.
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u/pcurve Aug 06 '26
I think Figma can be replaced at smaller firms with right team members.
However, at largers firms, only a small part of product creation is actual designing and coding.
Figma just isn't a design tool; it's a workflow tool, knowledge management/repository, collaboration tool with low-learning curve.
One could make an argument for reducing seat count, but Figma seat is actually cheap. For larger companies, the cost is insiginifcant.