September 30, 2025 · JustSayAI

Up 250% on Day One: Can Figma Ride the AI Hype to Become the Next Adobe?

For Figma, the end-game was never to become Adobe. It was to become the Notion of product design—and to IPO at the $20 billion valuation Adobe almost paid.

Figma’s rise owes less to founder genius than to a perfect trifecta: the right tech, the right trend, and the right competitor asleep at the wheel.

Figma’s three tailwinds

First, the tech tailwind. Co-founder Dylan Field originally wanted to build drones, but his partner balked at the defense angle. They pivoted to an obscure WebGL experiment: a design tool that ran in the browser. At a time when “pro software” meant a fat desktop binary, that was a moonshot.

Second, the aesthetic tailwind. Design swung from hyper-real skeuomorphism to flat minimalism. Bloated Photoshop felt like using a tank to swat a fly; lightweight Figma arrived just in time. If the visual pendulum hadn’t swung, Adobe’s monopoly might still be unchallenged.

Third—and most decisive—it surgically removed every pain point that plagued Sketch. Sketch was Mac-only; Figma ran everywhere. Sketch files lived in Dropbox purgatory; Figma was multiplayer by default. Throw in a thriving community and Figma felt like a cheat code.

Early to wake, late to the AI party

Figma should have owned design-AI. Its plugin marketplace was already crawling with AI hacks, and in June 2023 it acquired Diagram, the buzziest AI-plugin shop in town. Jordan Singer, Diagram’s founder, is the kind of techno-flaneur who prototypes in public. Everyone braced for a megaton AI reveal.

One year later we got… generative UI clip-art. Figma’s big AI swing feeds a prompt into a large model that assembles prefab components into a “screen.” Pretty the first time, boring the third, and on the fourth you realize it’s a shameless rip of Apple’s Weather app. Users roasted it on Twitter; the clip went viral for all the wrong reasons.

AI is theater; IPO is the plot

Why the face-plant? Simple: Figma never answered “who actually wants this?”

Pro designers? They have battle-tested workflows; cookie-cutter layouts insult them. Total newbies? They’ll jump to no-code web generators before learning Figma’s node system.

That user-identity crisis made AI investment feel like burning money on a fireworks show nobody asked to watch. So Figma did the ruthlessly rational thing: park the moonshots and double-down on boring, bankable SaaS expansion.

After the Adobe deal died, an independent IPO became existential. Designer TAM is tapped out; two-thirds of Figma seats today belong to PMs, engineers, marketers—anyone but designers. Those are the wallets that can triple ARR.

Hence the product blitz of the last 12 months: FigJam (whiteboard), Slides (Keynote killer), Buzz (marketing collateral), Developer Mode (inspect, redline, hand-off). The message is unambiguous: AI can wait; owning the workflow entrance is non-negotiable.

Comparing Figma to Adobe is category error. Adobe’s core is brand, print, photo, video—battlegrounds where Canva and Midjunch are landing punches. Figma lives in product UI; its enemy is the erasure of the mockup itself.

The old pipeline was “requirements → mockup → code,” with Figma as the indispensable bridge. The emerging pipeline is “requirements → code,” written by a PM in Cursor using vibe-coding prompts. When a product manager can ship a working frontend in an afternoon, why open Figma at all?

Two-thirds of Figma’s seats are non-designers whose switching cost is a Slack message. The moment they find a faster path, they’re gone—and when headcount for pixel-pushers shrinks, Figma’s core gravitational center disappears.

So stop clowning Figma for “bad AI.” Today’s gimmicky features are the cheapest possible insurance policy while it fortifies the moat that matters: the single source of truth where product, design, and dev lock in. Bet on workflow, not on any one model, and you keep pricing power whoever wins the foundation-layer war.

I’ll confess: AI prototyping tools have seduced me into thinking I can fake my way to beautiful UI. Then I see the output—an aesthetic crime scene—and remember why human designers still earn the big bucks.

Figma doesn’t want to be the next Adobe. It wants to be the Notion of making products. If it nails that, the IPO pop won’t be a 250% one-day firework; it’ll be the opening trade of a much longer rally.

Viewpoint distilled from my podcast: People’s Park Talks AI

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