Adobe recently announced it would acquire the creator collaboration platform Figma for $20 billion. Scott Belsky, chief product officer at Adobe, joined Cheddar New to discuss some questions and concerns about the acquisition. “Figma is an extraordinary product and one of the ways we're structuring our relationship with the whole figment team is intended to give them a lot of autonomy and allow them to continue doing what they're doing because they're doing such a great job," he said. 

Adobe recently announced it would acquire the creator collaboration platform Figma for $20 billion. Scott Belsky, chief product officer at Adobe, joined Cheddar New to discuss some questions and concerns about the the acquisition. “Figma is an extraordinary product and one of the ways we're structuring our relationship with the whole figment team is intended to give them a lot of autonomy and allow them to continue doing what they're doing because they're doing such a great job," he said.&nbsp;

Adobe Chief Product Officer Addresses Designer Concerns from Figma Deal

the world of creative technology, stunned last week by the news industry giant Adobe has acquired Fig MMA for $20 billion. Sigma is the maker of a hugely popular cloud based design software that allows teams to collaborate in real time and the proposed acquisition is expected to close in 2023. It's raised concerns among some adobe investors about its cost 50 times. Fig Mazz expected sales for the year. Well, joining me now to break down the deal is Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president and Adobe Creative Cloud scott, it's great to see you this afternoon. Thanks so much for coming on the show. So tell me here, how will the acquisition of Sigma benefit the company and users of Adobe products? Yeah, well, there's a number of synergies that we're most excited about. I mean this is just an extraordinary product that has reimagined the whole segment of product design and product development to the point where it's now become vertically integrated. You know, it's fascinating that over 30% of Sigma's users or developers and another 20% of folks are other stakeholders of the product experience. And if you think about it, you know more and more of our life every day takes place in an interactive product experience, whether we're ordering food or booking a hotel or a flight or, or you know, on social networks, it's all within a product experience. Um, these product experiences oftentimes have assets in the, in them like video imagery, animation, other assets that are that are creative cloud tools make. But product design and development is a segment. We're super excited to get in. And the second thing is that it's an amazing platform, has built a web native multiplayer platform that we think is part of the solution for the future of creativity. So we're really excited to bring new capabilities To that segment, to that, to that platform and leverage some of the things stigma has done as well, like Fig Jam, which is a great productivity tool that that we also think we can bring to our customers. So there are a number of synergies that really drive the deal here for us. Okay, well I want to talk more about the platform and some of these updates that will be seen in a moment, but I got to ask about the $20 billion dollar valuation, certainly a pricey penny in this current economic environment. How do you land on that? Right. Well, you know, there's a lot that goes into the valuation of a company. Um and we've shared a few things publicly. You know, we've certainly talked about the fact that stigma really just started monetizing itself about four years ago and you know, it's gonna close at around 400 million in revenue. So that's quite a dramatic rise in terms of growth. Right? We've talked about just amazing. Um uh net revenue retention numbers. Um we've talked just about a number, a number of other kind of metrics that, you know under the hood give us promise about not only growth of their product but also the growth of the segment of product design and development. But it's also a calculation around what we can bring in terms of synergy value. There are so many ways acrobat reaches over a billion customers. Adobe express now has millions of monthly active users. All of those customers would likely benefit from a product like Fig Jam, which is their white boarding and collaborative collaboration tool. And then you also think about, again the growing use cases of multiplayer web native tools and how we can actually bring some of our creative capabilities to get the benefits of fig Mazz virology for some of our products. So again, when you do all the all the analysis, we just found it to be extraordinarily compelling and critical to the future growth of prospects of our company. We have high hopes for where Adobe is going to go in the coming years. I'm sure you definitely do their scott. I want to actually hear from some of the designers they have been taking to social media to talk about the deal, what they like, what they dislike but in this case saying that they don't want to see any changes to fig MMA What would you say to those who actually just wanted to kind of stay the same functioning the same way that it has. Well listen, figure is an extraordinary product and one of the ways we're structuring our relationship with the whole figment team is intended to give them a lot of autonomy and allow them to continue doing what they're doing because they're doing such a great job and, and really for us just to be supportive and helpful in them on the journey ahead. Um, I also want to say that, you know, acquisitions, um, you know, are ultimately up to the people involved. You know, I came in through adobe to adobe through an acquisition of Behan. We were one million members at the time. Now we're 10 years later, 30 million members. And the product is probably stronger, tighter and faster growing than it's ever been before. And the number of other acquisitions we've done in recent years that all the teams that are involved as well as the customers would probably say everyone's better off as a result. So that's up to us, right. It's up to us to show, not tell and for the teams to work together to to be stewards for the community. I think that's a really good point. Look, certainly in the deal making environment, I think that from a broader business perspective, people would see this deal certainly as a good sign that deals can still happen growth can still happen in this current economic environment, especially after what we heard from the Fed chair earlier this afternoon scott. I do want to ask you about the cost. Right? So one of the reasons that I think designers really loved Fig MMA, is that it was free to them. Are you planning to change that at all now that it's under the will be under the adobe umbrella? No, it's a great question. I mean, all modern products these days have a freemium approach. And also we've always loved how figure is free for education. We've committed to continuing to make sigma available to all students for free. Um and we have no plans to change any of the offerings of pricing. Again, this is a product that's growing extremely well virally through teams that use it and we want to really be the wind at its back. So there are no plans. And in fact, we've reiterated our commitment to preserving stigmas approach with education and freemium use. Alright, Scott Belsky, Thank you again for joining the show. Scott is of course the chief product officer and executive vice president and Adobe Creative Cloud