Figma's Blockbuster IPO, Tech IPOs Heat Up & Silicon Valley's New Obsession | Aug 1, 2025

0:12Welcome everyone to the information's TITV. My name is Akash Basricha. It is Friday and Silicon Valley is buzzing today from the Monster Figma IPO that happened yesterday. We're going to try to make sense of all of it. But really, I mean, today on the show, what we want to get to is what this IPO really means for the IPO markets and put it all into context. We've got two very special guests coming on the show from Sapphire Ventures and WonderCo to help us make sense of all that. We're also going to talk about Amazon and Apple. They reported earnings last night. Coinbase also reported. We're going to get to that.

0:48And then to close out the show, we're going to go over to the land of seed investing with my friend Evan Tanna from South Park Commons. He's going to come on the show. And we're going to close out with a very interesting story on microplastics. That is the subject of our weekend magazine feature this weekend. It's a busy show. We got a lot to do. So let's get right into it. We're talking about Figma. Unless you were living in the woods yesterday, Figma went public. They priced at$33. The stock opened at$85. It closed at$115. It's trading up again this morning. It's, depending on what share price you take, it's about four times the IPO price.

1:27Market cap is many multiples higher than what Adobe offered to pay at the$20 billion price tag. Look, we have covered Figma, you know, for many years now. Now, a couple of big stories that I just want to put in front of you for this weekend, for your weekend reading. We had a profile on Dylan Field. That is a good read. I'll link that in the show notes. We also had an analysis of its valuation. That was very interesting. And then the last story is we actually had a story about the big winners in the IPO. You've probably heard of some of the biggest winners like Kleiner Perkins and like Index. Iconic Capital is also a big winner.

2:03and my colleagues Corey Weinberg and Natasha Mascarena has had a good story talking about that. But today, what we really want to do is we want to figure out what all this means. And so joining me now for that discussion is J.Dos, the co-founder and president of Sapphire Ventures. He has seen 14 of his portfolio companies go public over the years. And I also want to bring on Jeffrey Niken, a general partner at investment firm Wunderco, which also was an investor in Figma. I want to bring both of them on together, and the three of us are going to hash this all out. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

2:39Thanks for being here. Thanks, Akash, for having me. Yeah, thanks, Akash. Nice to be here. So, Jay, I want to start with you. What did you make of it? Figma. Well, you know, Figma has been studying kind of, you know, like trailblazing all along its journey, right? If you look at back in the round they did in 2019, that was like one of the first 100X ARR companies, right? They didn't actually raise any, they didn't have any revenues in the first two rounds they did. And then, you know, it went along all the way. They were one of the first companies to get to 10 billion in valuation. And then, you know, the 20 billion mark that Adobe said are 22 billion.

3:23And now this IPO. So I think they have been a trailblazer, you know, Silicon Valley company. And I mean, let's just talk about the IPO yesterday. I mean, what did you make of where they priced it at and then the pop that came after? Yeah, that was the surprising part, right? Like, you never see a pop like this, you know, unless it's a very retail heavy or retail focused kind of IPO. And it was surprising, right? I think the bankers really got it wrong because if you look at, you know, how much Dylan sold, with like 60 million at the IPO, and it probably would have been, what, 200 million now where it's trading, right?

4:03So yeah, a lot of people left a lot of money on the table. But look, it is great for the people who bought at the IPO. All the hedge funds and the long-only funds, you know, they bought a lot, like what, 36 million shares, and about 54 million shares traded yesterday. So about one and a half X. So I would bet that most of the people, the hedge funds and the mutual funds who bought up the IPO, probably traded out, probably 70, 80 % of their holdings. And then we'll probably trade back in when we get the final price in six months, when the lockup expires and Figma announces two quarters of earnings.

4:42I think that is when we know what price this company will trade in the future, what multiple it will trade in the future. Jeff, let's go to you. WonderCo is a Figma investor. When you saw the price that they priced it at, $33 a share, what did you think of that? Yeah, look, we thought it was low. I mean, the reality is, and I've been talking to Corey about this for the last six to 12 months, the public markets have been absent high growth software now for a long time. Prior to Figma, the highest growth software company in the market was growing less than 30%. So I think the paradigm for public investors is very different today than it was five or 10 years ago when they were getting good looks at all these super high quality growth software companies and growth technology companies generally.

5:30So I think this was an interesting test case in terms of seeing a super high quality software company, which Figma is, with very high growth, what level of premium the public market's willing to pay given they haven't seen one for a long time. And look, we're in price discovery mode with the IPO. So let's see. But it's clear, you know, look, it's clear that the market's going to pay up for it. And I personally think this is a signal of the changing role of how the public and private markets interact. If you look at history, the public markets were really always the source of big liquidity. If you ever wanted big liquidity as a technology company, you had to go to the public markets.

6:09You were generally a price taker. They had pricing power. Now we've transitioned this world where if you're a great company and you never want to go public, you don't have to. You have access to the private markets. So what does that mean? In my view, I think what may happen is the public market may need a different stimulus to bring companies public, which in this case is a first case, but we'll see if it's true, which is they just need to pay a premium. And I think this premium valuation may make other high quality private companies all else equal think, hey, I may not need to go public, but this is pretty cool if I get a meaningfully higher valuation.

6:44So I'm curious to see what comes from here because I think it's going to be fun the next few years. I mean, look, Jeff, let's just do a bit of a sanity check here. I mean, you know, like the valuation, it's depending on which share price you take, it's 50, 60 times forward revenue. I mean, what are people in your circle saying right now when they look at this valuation right now? Yeah, I mean, look, Figma is an undeniably awesome company. I think we can all agree on that on the phone. It's got a great business model, plus high growth, plus good unit economics, plus a great management team. That said, this offering is pretty small from a liquidity perspective relative to the size of the company.

7:25So you have to bear that in mind. Two is we're sort of still in that price discovery mode where TBD, although I'm pretty optimistic earnings in a couple of weeks like i said earlier growth is a unit of growth is worth more than a unit of profit and i think in the last year plus the the public markets have really navigated towards you know rule of 40 is it is certainly legit but it does weight growth and margin equally and i think if you were to look at history and just you know you can play this out with a simple financial model a unit of growth is worth more than a unit of of margin so i think i mean that's clearly the case here because you I think people were expecting that you had to be growing fast and you had to be quite a bit profitable.

8:17That was the thinking in the last couple of years in terms of when you could IPO. Figma is, I mean, it just turned profitable. It's just getting on its way here. Jay, chime in here. Yeah, I think what Figma also wrote was the AI kind of tailwinds, right? I think Figma had a really good AI story that went out there. And I think the market is just craving not only for software high-growth stocks, but AI stocks, right? Look at Corvee, look at Palantir. So I think a lot of the retail and even the hedge funds and the mutual funds, they actually invested because of the AI story that Figma potentially has, right?

9:01And they have built a bunch of products, not a lot of revenues there but when you see the earnings from microsoft and meta you know that there is a lot of tailwinds in ai and there is a lot of future growth and i think that is what making people go after figma's stock even though most of its business right now it's i mean it's not really an it's a it's kind of a classic sas company at the end of the day 100 but the ai story is there right and i think that people believe that figma can you know they have distribution because the number of customers they have. And their new AI products are kind of, they're recent, but have started to take traction within the market.

9:41And I think that's what people are betting on. And the other thing is that they showed some growth and projected growth, I think 35 % for this year, although the last quarter, they grew only 45%. So I think the whisper numbers for their growth are probably much higher than what is in the models that they gave to the analysts. So, you know, I want to come to both of you on this question here. So let's look ahead now. So, you know, Figma has happened. Circle has happened. You know, we had CoreWeave too. So where are we now? Also Palantir. Right. Well, I'm talking about recent IPOs. So, I mean, look, Circle jumped, Figma jumped, CoreWeave is also up.

10:23So, Jay, let's start with you. I mean, is the IPO window now open? I mean, are companies going to start rushing in? I don't think IPO market is open for everybody. I think IPO market still needs at least five, six billion of market cap because you need at least 500 million to a billion, which is 10 % of the market cap as float to be able to be public. And you need to have a high growth story, right? So if you are going to go out there with a 20 % growth at 200 million, I don't think you can IPO, unless you have a really, really strong AI story that you can provide that's saying that the growth will come because of the AI story that we have.

11:03So I don't think the IPO market is open for any kind of stock or company out there. And it's interesting to see who comes out. Jeff, what do you think? Yeah, I have a little bit of a different view there, which is, first of all, I think capital market conditions right now are about as good as they get in terms of all the way around, whether you look in private markets, public markets, you know, we are in a Goldilocks environment. I think one thing to be mindful of generally for folks is these next six months, don't forget about the tariffs and the flow through that those are going to have on consumer spending.

11:35I mean, I'm sure you guys saw the unemployment print today. So just something to consider. But I continue to believe that the going public decision is more at the discretion of the companies than it used to be. And the main reason a lot of them choose not to go public is they don't want to because there's various disclosure requirements that are more onerous. There's a level of near-term management that you're required to do with public visibility. But again, I think for the public markets to be compelling, they need to offer something. And I think this could be a sign of the future, which is they're going to offer premium valuation.

12:11And I do think to the extent this premium valuation environment persists, that will draw out some companies that are otherwise neutral about going. So I'm curious to see where Figma trades post earnings once we've had some real data digested. But I think this could be the start of a more friendly or just a willingness of the capital markets to recognize that they need to pay up for the quality companies. But I mean, you talked about tariffs and we saw it this morning. I mean, you had Figma yesterday, right? It was sort of this big, acute event that happened. And then this morning, the tariffs, you know, the market's down this morning.

12:51And so there is sort of that broader uncertainty that companies, every company has to deal with. And so, I mean, Jeff, how do you square those two things? Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think the, you know, one of the things I learned doing public markets for a long time is they tend to really capitalize current conditions. And the reality is we haven't seen the impact of tariffs in a material way yet. I mean, I think this is the first harbinger we had on this unemployment report today. But I think going forward, you know, between the tariffs and the federal layoffs and what have you, I think there's a scenario where, you know, consumer spend, which is the vast majority of the economy, slows.

13:31And that trickles into earnings. And earnings is always the number one driver of the stock market. And right now, the earnings have been great. I mean, as Jay mentioned earlier, the big tech names have blown it out so far. And so TBD, but I think we may see some earnings impacts even on the big tech names later in the year. Jay, what do you think? Yeah, no, I do think the earnings are, you know, it's up TBD, as Jeff said. But to be fair, I think there is a lot of AI tailwind in a lot of these companies, right? And I think if you look at the big tech firms who have actually been able to really, really start using AI in their products and using it to make them more efficient, I think they are still going to have the tailwind.

14:21Because I think, and I'm speaking from the Valley, right, from Silicon Valley, and being very optimist about what AI can do. We look at some of the, look, we didn't talk about like OpenAI and Anthropic and the way you guys have reported. Information has done a great job reporting on their kind of revenues and the kind of growths that they have at scale. So I do think that, yes, there's macro issues that might come because of tariffs and things. but I think the companies that are really full on into AI and have really great AI products, I think they're still going to be beating earnings. Right.

14:58Well, look, it's a fascinating discussion. I want to thank you both for joining us. I mean, it was a big day yesterday and we're going to be continuing to put these IPOs in context of the broader market. So Jay and Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. It was a great conversation. That is Jay Das from Sapphire Ventures and Jeffrey Katsuyen from Wunderco. Okay, we're going to continue the conversation here and bring on our IPO reporter, Corey Weinberg. He has been following Figma and just about every other IPO, I should say, that has happened, is happening, could be happening. He is also the king of our IPO tracker that is live on our website, The Information.

15:43Corey, I want to bring you in because you have been talking to people all around the secret system. I should say, before we get started, it's an Oakland A's jersey, am I right? Oakland A's jersey. What's the occasion? It's Casual Friday. It's IPO day. In a post-IPO day, I woke up in a bit of a drunken haze in a post-IPO pop. Right. And so, you know, just wanted to keep it loose today. Nice. Okay. All right. Just like Wall Street clearly is with this Figma IPO. Well, so go there. So, I mean, is that what people are saying right now that you're talking to? I mean, people are certainly saying it's irrational exuberance, like it's a textbook case study of that.

16:30You know, I wrote this yesterday. If you were to look at the price that Figma was trading at at the end of day one, it would be trading at about, you know, sort of in the 50 times forward revenue range, which is more than double that of any other publicly traded software company, aside from the king of retail meme stocks, which is Palantir. And so no, you know, institutional investor that looked at Figma, you know, in his roadshow said, you know, I think this thing is worth that much. Everyone liked it. It's just kind of trading up above fundamentals and kind of a classic. classic way and talk about the pricing here because you know we just heard from jay and from jeff and and jeff said that he thought that it was low where they had priced it at and clearly there was some money left on the table so why do you think they priced it where they did i think figma and their ceo dylan field uh who i've profiled uh a few weeks ago they have a track record of being fairly conservative on these sorts of things um and not being that greedy.

17:42When they did a tender offer last year, $12.5 billion, which was way below the$20 billion price they had agreed to sell to Adobe a couple years earlier. Dillon Field is a CEO who took several years to even launch his product. He wanted to make sure it was perfect. He wanted to make sure it was right. And what I'm hearing now in terms of how Figma and their bankers handled this IPO, they really wanted to get stock in the hands of the longest of long-term investors, the top mutual funds, the top long onlys, as they say, on Wall Street. And by that nature, you don't have that much selling on day one.

18:26And so you're going to see the few shares that do trade hands keep trading over and over again. And that's how you see an IPO pop like this. Talk to me about, you know, the other pre-IPO companies that you're following. You know, we had two sort of divergent opinions just now on the show about whether or not the IPO window is now officially open. We're going to see everyone running for the floodgates or, you know, we got this broader macroeconomic, you know, condition that is sort of overhanging the whole market. So how are other pre-IPO companies thinking about this now? they certainly like what they're seeing i mean it they it certainly causes ceos and boards particularly at high growth you know sort of private companies to look at this ipo and say maybe we can get way more than we thought and then that becomes a different calculation in terms of whether to raise a round privately or go public i thought i mean parker conrad the ceo rippling tweeted something to the effect yesterday of of like you know asking for a friend you know what does this figma ipo mean for for late stage private sass and you know you can be sure that you know sort of that sort of sentiment is happening around the valley the thing though is to remember is like companies aren't can't flip a switch and go public uh you know from from everything that we're tracking there's really only you know maybe a half dozen you know sort of names that are, you know, sort of VC backed, you know, highly valued that I'm expecting to go public, you know, this, you know, for the remainder of this year.

20:08And so for the rest of the class is 2026 at the earliest and who knows what happens between now and then. So, you know, that we could be looking back at this and saying, man, a bunch of companies missed their window and Figma grabbed it, or we're about to enter another couple of years of a boom cycle. Well, look, Corey, I've really enjoyed reading all of your reporting over the past few months about Figma, and there is more to come, I know, about all these companies. So thank you for coming on the show, and I'm sure we'll have you on again when another one of these companies starts to make some noise about rushing for the floodgates.

20:48That is Corey Weinberg, our IPO reporter. Now, look, Figma wasn't the only big news last night. We had big earnings from Apple, Amazon, and Coinbase. The three of them reported. That's just three of the companies. Other companies also reported. But I want to start with these three. And I want to give you one number from each of those prints that you need to be paying attention to. Now, for Amazon's earnings, the number that you need to focus on is 18%. That was the growth rate for Amazon Web Services in the second quarter. It's revenue growth, I should say. That growth rate was actually the same as last quarter.

21:25But the thing is, it is much slower than the growth rates that Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have posted in the most recent quarter. I mean, both of those businesses are smaller than AWS. But, you know, Azure and other cloud services, that business line from Microsoft, it is growing at 39%. Google Cloud is growing at 31%. And then you've got AWS, which is, again, 18%. And so that all seemed to spook Amazon investors. And that's part of the reason why stock was trading down this morning. But those were the highlights from Amazon's earnings last night. For Apple, the number that you need to pay attention to is 10%.

22:03That is how fast the company's total revenue is growing. It was also the fastest revenue has grown since 2021. and the company said that most of that came from the popularity of the iPhone 16, which was a big factor, even though I really still don't like this side button here with the camera. My finger keeps hitting it, but that's a knee problem, I think, apparently. It was iPhone sales, and then also people jumping to buy products ahead of the tariffs was another thing that Tim Cook said had an impact. And so that was the highlights from Apple's earnings. The last earnings to get to is Coinbase.

22:45Coinbase reported last night, the number you need to know is 3%. It's kind of a small number, but that is how much revenue grew compared to last year. And if you think it's slow, the stock market did too. The shares were trading down this morning. And basically just to walk you through what happened here, Coinbase's transaction revenue, this is where that makes money for people trading on its crypto exchange. That fell year over year, but its subscription revenue came up. Problem is the subscription revenue coming up didn't make up for the transaction revenue falling enough to really kickstart revenue growth.

23:19And so that's why revenue growth was pretty tepid at 3%, but that is the highlight from Coinbase. Okay, we've talked about the big tech companies. Okay, we've talked about the newly big tech companies. Silicon Valley is full of those, but the bread and butter of the Valley is really its early stage ecosystem. And so I want to roll us right back into the land of seed investing. Evan Tanna is a partner at South Park Commons and the company focuses on this really interesting phase of startups, which is what they call the negative one to the zero. And so I want to bring Evan on to help us understand that.

23:55Evan, it is your first time on TITB. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Josh. Good morning. Happy to be here. So talk to me about negative one to zero. What does that even mean? Yeah, well, we describe it as a kind of the phase in which you're figuring out what your next big swing is. And being patient about finding which hill you want to climb. And so we have a huge philosophy around not settling for your local maxima, but remaining really curious and pulling out some threads around where you see the world is going. But taking your time to figure out what that sort of like big, impactful mountain is you want to climb.

24:31and then once you figure that out, accelerate and do it. So figuring out basically like what is the idea that is best to work on right now in this moment? Not even just the idea. I mean, we're pre-idea. So it's a lot around like what vector should you be applying yourself in? Because a lot of the idea that will actually come through the negative one to one, as we know, like the first idea that you have is unlikely to be the one that works. But what's most important is to figure out if there's like, honestly, founder of future alignment with where you want to apply your time, effort, and intellect.

25:03Okay, founder-future alignment. So this is like what I'm working on has the potential to grow. Is that the idea? There's that. I think it's a lot more inward too. And I'll give Mike Maples credit here. He actually coined the term founder-future. I used to describe this founder market fit, but I think founder-future is better. The question of what personal experience, what insight,

25:30what sort of skills you bring to a future that you want to manifest and making sure you figure that out. So that's what we described the negative one to zero as. Got it, got it. You know, I want to get your take on the current state of seed investing, but I think this has to do with the negative one to zero. I mean, you guys want to run a great fellowship program. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. Yeah, the fellowship program is our early stage funding program. And it's sort of three parts to it. There's community, long-term support, and capital. And the capital comes in the form of 400K upfront and 600K guaranteed in your next round.

26:05I start with community because that is the core of South Park Commons. South Park Commons, founded 10 years ago, was founded on the belief that during the negative one to zero, the blessed place to do it is in a talent-dense environment, a place in which you're drawing inspiration from others, you're holding yourself accountable amongst others, and really you sort of benefit from the energy of everybody else who's really technical, talented, and ambitious. So the Founder Fellowship is something that we run within SPC, and so our members and our founders will come in and join the community with capital to accelerate and then go find that number they want to find.

26:43Right. Let's take a step back here. You know, I kind of want to get your take on the current status of seed investing. You know, we just talked all about IPO markets. And so now I want to come right back to seed investing. You know, I kind of wonder how has AI changed seed investing? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I start with the obvious, which is it's an incredible time to build. Okay. We feel it daily within South Park Commons. So you got to build, right? The pace at which the large foundation model companies and the large tech companies are rolling out, innovations that both enable new startups, but also keep early stage founders on their toes is, I would say, an exhilarating time.

27:26So that's number one. I think number two is we have seen just this proliferation of the ways in which you can apply the technology in the last two years. And so from our vantage point, we're seeing everything from Sumer and I to robotics and deep tech to interesting vertical SaaS applications to obviously all the infrastructure and dev tools. And I would argue two years ago, there wasn't that level of diversity of ideas. And it's really exciting to see sort of like the technical inflection points sort of percolate into all of these different categories. Right. I think a third observation is we are seeing companies get to revenue a lot faster.