Figma was born of a technical breakthrough that leveraged WebGL to deliver powerful graphical capabilities in the browser; the browser made Figma collaborative, what I call the operating system of design. Figma has had a fascinating road: the company accepted an acquisition offer from Adobe in 2022, but due to regulatory resistence the latter was forced to abandon the merger in late 2023. Figma instead IPO'd in 2025, and after skyrocketing to a valuation of $56.3 billion, has since crashed to a market cap of less than $10 billion, less than half of Adobe's offer, thanks in large part to a market narrative that the company is an AI loser.
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The best companies are almost never built by people who set out to build a company. They're built by people who set out to solve a problem so important to them that they couldn't not work on it. The company is almost an afterthought — it's the vehicle, not the destination.
Kareem Amin — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
world models AI systems that learn from site and sound to understand and simulate how the real world works over time, predicting what happens next and letting us interact with those simulated futures.
The Business of Tech
Most people think about company building as: you get a great idea, you find product market fit, and then you scale. But the most durable companies are built by people who are obsessed with a problem, not a solution — because the solution will change many times, but the problem stays constant.
Kareem Amin — Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy