Disclaimer, all these thoughts and opinions are our own and our guests and do not belong to any entities we're involved in.
Also keep in mind we are active college students so any of this does not reflect active investment advice or counsel.
Welcome back everyone to the Uninvested Podcast. I'm Crockett Callaway.
I'm Sahil Seth.
And if you've been sticking around for a while, you'll probably remember episode 1 part 1 where we discussed Adobe's recent acquisition of famed UIUX startup Figma for $20 billion.
Tons of investors supported Figma along the way and we're thrilled at the exit.
One of them being Kinder Perkins. Kinder Perkins is a legacy Silicon Valley VC fund with tons of notable investments.
Robinhood, Plaid, Cameo, Twitter, the list is literally endless.
It goes on.
They also just raised an additional $1.8 billion for two new funds, KP20 and Select2 in January, which is their 50th year round.
And today we're super grateful and super excited to have Sean Manion today.
Sean is an investor at Kleiner Perkins, but formerly comes from Bay and Capital in Susquehanna.
He spent years on both sides of the entrepreneurial process, first as a student founder at NU Northwestern, Gil Katz, and now on the buy side.
From cybersecurity to infrastructure tech, Sean has seen a ton and we're thrilled to learn from him.
And since this is an ongoing deal, we should mention that there are some limitations to some of the areas Sean can speak about.
Thanks for coming, Sean.
Yeah, thank you guys for having me.
Dom, how's your day going so far?
It's been good. It's been good.
It's a busy Tuesday.
Met with a couple of founders, worked on a couple of things.
It's business as usual here.
Have you guys been at the office a lot or kind of just kind of virtual hybrid in that aspect?
Yeah, so we're hybrid.
I come in about three days a week, but we go down.
So we have an office on Sand Hill Road down in Menlo Park and we all go down there once a week for like all team kind of investment meeting,
you know, a bunch of one-on-ones and then we also have an office up in San Francisco, which is where I'm at today.
And is that the kind of in the new remote hybrid world we're living in, is that the balance you kind of like or are you trying to go in more?
What does that look like?
Yeah, I actually like coming into the office.
Honestly, like it's mostly because I just get a free lunch out of it and like I don't have to worry about that.
But it's nice.
Like, you know, in-person meetings are definitely different from Zoom meetings, in my opinion.
Like you get you actually get to connect with the person you're talking to, whether that's like a founder or another investor.
I just feel like the in-person meetings actually like I tend to value them a lot more having gone through like two years of Zoom classes and stuff.
And so, yeah, it's been good.
I try to come in as much as I can.
I think every partner is different.
Like some partners never come in.
Some partners are always here.
And it's also nice.
You kind of get a lot of face time with them if you're in the office more.
Well, hopefully when you become a recurring guest, we can have you in person in the studio and not over the Zoom.
I would love that.
I know personally, I need to be in person unless I find myself, you know, laying on my bed when we have Zoom classes.
So it's not really as productive, we'd say.
But why don't we just jump into our first question?
So we did see that KPMorale must be high with the Figma deal.
We saw the whole website dedicated to Figma congratulating them.
So really, when was the first time you heard about Figma and what really stood out to you?
Yeah, so obviously heard a bunch about Figma after I joined Kleiner.
I joined Kleiner about six months ago.
So I'm relatively new to the investment team.
But the first time I heard about Figma was actually at Northwestern.
And all I really knew it as at the time was like there's this like interesting like design prototyping tool that actually one of...
So I was working on a startup at Northwestern.
One of my designers was using Figma to build like, you know, like our design template and like some UI stuff for us.
And that was the first time like I played around with it.
I had seen kind of the, you know, the actual product and it was super cool.
Like, you know, my designers could collaborate on what they were working on.
You know, we could build a design template from scratch.
It was a really easy way for me as like someone kind of managing product to like see what was going on and like visualize the product that we were building.
And that's the first time I kind of came across it.
But then, you know, when I became an investor, you know, thought about it from completely a different angle, which is also pretty cool.
So I'm curious about that angle that you mentioned.
So let's first start. So you're at Northwestern.
You're a student founder. I heard you kind of like you slip that in there a little bit.
Are you looking at Figma back then from more of like an entrepreneurial founder perspective, thinking like, oh, what makes this work?
What makes it doesn't? What does that look like when you're actually a student?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm you know, they have it's actually pretty cool.
Figma has like this free education tier.
So like with your Northwestern address, like we had access to pretty much the entire suite of tool that Figma had to offer.
And so as a student founder, it's really, really helpful, right, because you get this like enterprise grade tool, but you're paying nothing for it.
And so for me, it's like, OK, like I have two designers and like one kind of front end engineer who like live and die with Figma.
Right. So for me, it's really cool because I can jump in at any time, see what they're working on, have a really good idea of like what the product should look like.
You can really play around with the entire flow of what the product should go from top to bottom.
Right. So like as a designer, when you're putting it in front of a customer, you can walk them through a wireframe, like step by step, see how it resonates.
Like it's pretty cool. And you can start to visualize how like an enterprise would use this tool and why it's such a critical component of every design team out there.
For sure. And so I'm curious about that angle switch a little bit more.
So KP, if I recall first, kind of started interacting 2017 with Figma.
So obviously longer than the six months that you've been at KP, but I assume that once you got there, morale was still high, as Taho was mentioning before.
What are the kind of like murmurs about Figma look like then when you actually arrived at KP?
Yes, when I came to KP, Figma was a KP.
I forget which fund it was in, but it was like an early deal for us.
I think it was one of the first deals that Mamoon, one of the partners here did.
And all I knew about Figma was that it was one of our big winners.
Right. It was a company that everybody knew.
Everybody spoke very, very highly of Dylan, the founder and CEO of Figma.
And funnily enough, Dylan's history with KP goes back to before his Figma days.
So Dylan was actually a Kleiner Perkins fellow, which is like this fellowship that we have for college students to get placed within our portfolio companies.
And so he was a Kleiner Perkins fellow back in 2012.
And so that was his first interaction with Kleiner Perkins. And so he had known the Kleiner Perkins team for a while.
There's a lot of people at Kleiner who had been there for like the last 10, 15 years who had known of Dylan.
And then obviously we made the big investment in 2017 and then the company just has been on a rocket ship ever since.
So it's like a really cool success story of like a really inspiring founder who comes out of the Kleiner Perkins fellowship.
But two, it's like one of the big winners in our portfolio.
So that's the context under which I had kind of met them or I'd known them after I joined Kleiner.
So when you hear about Figma, do you really think like, wow, this company is going to change just UI, UX field?
Or do you think this idea of the collaboration thesis could be applied to so many other industries?
What's really the main focus here?
Yeah, I think the collaboration thesis has and will continue to apply in many different industries.
Right. Like both Ilya and Mamoon were on the board of Slack.
And obviously, like the core thesis of Slack was also built around collaboration.
Right. And so I think like collaboration and like workflow tooling has always been a big part of what we've invested in at Kleiner.
So, right, you go there, you go to Kleiner, excuse me, and you know, it's one of their big winners.
You're still hearing murmurs about them.
And then obviously, this amazing deal comes around, which has now been a huge win.
The deal, if you remember for our viewers who are now talking to kind of whoever you are viewers, Adobe purchased Figma for about 20 billion dollars.
And they've kind of formed this partnership that is super famed.
There's articles about it all over.
What do you make of the partnership?
Why do you think it's a great one?
What do you think kind of the benefits look like here?
Yeah, for sure.
I think it's probably no secret that the acquisition is like Adobe buying one of the most exciting and like fast growing competitors to their core business.
Right. So like to me, I read it the same way probably you read the news.
Right. Like the markets reacted very differently than I think internal sentiment was for us.
Like we were very, very excited because I think like this unlocks like a new chapter for Figma in the sense of like,
I think Figma, you know, for the first couple of years of its journey was selling to a lot of tech forward companies like many other startups.
Right. And then now they're at the point in their journey where they're selling to a lot of enterprises.
But what the Adobe acquisition basically allows them to do is like to access this new distribution channel.
Right. Like Adobe is in basically every single enterprise in some capacity whatsoever, in some capacity.
And so like the opportunity to kind of like join forces with them and say, hey, like let's market Adobe plus Figma together to all these enterprises that we're not in yet.
Because I think like it's going to cause another kind of inflection in their journey.
So I think we're going to look back at this acquisition like 10 years from now and say it was like a Facebook buying Instagram type acquisition.
I think like the value creation of like the one plus one in this is going to be far greater than two, three or four.
You know, like I think there's there's an order of magnitude here that like Figma is going to unlock in terms of customers,
in terms of like the size of the deals that they're going to be closing now.
And so I think I'm very, very bullish on it.
I will say, though, I think this is very unlike a lot of other acquisitions in the sense of like Dylan is a very special founder who like believes in running Figma as a separate entity.
And I think he's not someone to kind of like I'm not going to I don't speak for Dylan.
I don't speak for Kleiner. But like, you know, my sentiment and like from what I understand what he's told publicly,
like he's not someone who's just going to get bogged down in the bureaucracy of being inside of Adobe.
I think like he is someone who's hyper, hyper focused on like, hey, like this is not the end of my journey.
Like this is like the beginning of phase two.
And like I'm here to prove like every single person who shorted the Adobe stock the day of the acquisition.
I'm here to prove them wrong.
I mean, yeah, I find that exactly like so much like Instagram being bought by Facebook.
It's a very separate entity. But I find the Adobe deal even more amazing.
You know, you can see the markets are in this recessionary environment and still putting a 50x multiple on any company regardless of,
you know, how much revenue doubling from 200, 400 million. It's still a crazy.
It's still going to cause news, you know, definitely going to cause a little bit of panic when it's like, how are they justifying it?
But I think you justified it perfectly looking forward for both companies.
It's just perfect synergies that they have.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think like Adobe, you know, is at this point, like I think they want to have access to the demographic that Figma does.
Right. Figma has done a wonderful job like getting in front of students.
Right. I think Adobe still is kind of working through a lot of that.
Figma has done a really great job like figuring out like how to build this really amazing, like intuitive product.
And I think Adobe has a lot to learn from that. So like the synergy is not just like Figma getting a lot of benefits from like Adobe's distribution in a lot of their enterprise customers.
I think it goes both ways.
And I think we've we've seen that already. They just Adobe just had their their annual like Max conference.
They were introducing a ton of new features like flavoring, like new collaboration features for Photoshop and Illustrator.
And so I think you're exactly right. Like they're they're super synergistic here.
And I think they have so much to learn from.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think like having Dylan as a part of that executive team will take them take them to the next step.
Like I think he is he's very special.
Like I think in many different ways, not just as a founder, but like the product, the company is really an avalanche.
Like there's nothing else really like it out there.
And like I think Adobe saw the same thing.
And that's the reason they were willing to pay the price they were willing to pay.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's very interesting, you know, having this big legacy firm by this hot startup.
But we talked a little bit about in the previous episode, you know, you mentioned about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp.
Do you think there's a difference in innovation speed when you have these giant legacy firms buying these, you know, very, very hot startups like Bigma?
First, you know, you have no competition.
Yeah, I think there can be right. There's plenty of counter examples where like buying a technology like I can think of a ton.
But like a good example of like it's like Twitter buying Vine.
Right. Like you've done a lot with that. And instead they like sunset it.
And now like they're trying to restart this code base from like 10 years ago.
Right. Like it's ridiculous.
And but at the same time, like you can also do it very right.
And like Instagram is a good example of doing it right.
Right. And like I think, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is someone who knows how to run separate entities.
Like he's grown WhatsApp. Right.
Like he knows like how to give, I think, autonomy to like the people and the companies that he buys.
And I think like Adobe, if they do it right, will do the exact same thing.
Like I think I think they'll you know, I get I don't speak for Adobe.
I don't speak for Sigma. Like but my hope would be that like they kind of give the company the autonomy to kind of continue growing by itself.
But I totally agree. Like I think done not right.
Like you can totally be slowed down by the bureaucracy of a large organization.
I'm curious about that idea of doing not right.
We've talked a lot about Dylan and kind of what makes him an amazing founder and his vision of really keeping Sigma running independently.
Right now, Adobe CEO Shantanu has come under like a lot of praise.
He's been there for a little bit. There's also talks of David Wanwani, who like might potentially succeed him at some point in the future.
Just like Dylan is doing a great job keeping them independent and being super innovative.
What do you think has to happen on Shantanu's end?
Like how does kind of he live up that end of being like a legacy leader and not really a founder?
Or how does that partnership interact?
Yeah, I think it's just an understanding that like like understanding of each other's relative position in the market.
Right. Like it's just being like, OK, like I understand my lane.
I understand your lane. I bought you because I understand your lane and I'm going to make sure that you keep that lane.
Right. Like I'm not going to try to like get into your lane.
I'm not going to try to like go downstream and like try to like release a bunch of these things that are competitive with Sigma.
You're not going to come into my lane. Like I'm not going to force you to sell a bunch of these like legacy products to people that are Sigma customers today.
Right. Like I think that's what they should do.
Again, this is all my personal opinion.
I think just like an understanding and like a very clear expectation of like, hey, like this is what you're selling.
This is what we're selling. Here is kind of like the exact points at which we're going to collaborate.
And this is like the one plus one equals three part of it.
But like we're going to make sure that like we're not stepping on each other's toes and like being very clear about what those boundaries are.
I think is important. Yeah.
You know, I do wonder about that.
Just like keeping separate. But it's like when you have you own the company, you see like the best facets, like the collaboration elements.
Like it must be so hard to restrain yourself.
Like Adobe, it's like, oh, we now know how to like make Adobe Cloud like a fully collaborative platform.
But it's like, you know, you kind of want to take some assets, you know, Facebook takes some assets from like Instagram and the entities that they buy.
But keeping it separate is definitely probably the hardest part, I'd say.
Yeah, no. And like with adding Facebook, the beautiful job with Instagram, right?
Like they taught Instagram how to monetize.
It's like, all right, we figured out this advertising engine will help you figure out the right parts of the advertising engine because we know how to do that well.
And like that's ultimately what makes Instagram like a standalone, like whatever, 100 billion dollar entity.
Right. And I think like that's that's kind of they need to find that common point.
And again, my personal opinion, I think like that common point, Figma has already cracked, I think, like getting into the enterprise.
I think what Adobe has a large distribution base already.
And so like, hey, like we have this customer base that we can tell you how to get in front of.
Right. Like I think that's the synergy. And for Adobe, it's like, hey, like what can we learn from what Figma has done well?
Right. Like just having access to people, not necessarily like, hey, like let's move some features here and there.
But like, hey, like we have access to these people who have built this really amazing collaborative product.
Like, let's learn from them. And I think that's kind of the learning that goes both ways.
I'm curious about we talk a lot about people both on the people who are building Figma than people who they're catering to this kind of beautiful,
like whole like family of designers who love to rally around products and they love to like push things forward all the time.
What do you think? Obviously, Figma is hugely popular with the designer base and a lot of designers have expressed their opinions on the deal.
What do you think they need to be doing now that this deal has gone through in the future to really make sure they're still catering to this like designer environment?
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I think it starts with Dylan's vision. Right.
Like I think he needs to be like, and he is right. Like you can hear everything he talks about is like, I am not done.
I'm not retiring. I'm like, what, 31 years old. Like this is not this is this is my act.
You know, like I'm here to prove every single naysayer wrong. So like I think he understands it really well.
But like just like they've done such a good job of like being like, we are friendly to the designers.
Like we're going to offer a free education here forever. We're not going to get we're not going to get rid of that.
Like he was very clear from that from day one. Right.
We were going to be like design first, design forward. Right.
Like we're not going to stop releasing new features.
But the cadence I wish we had released products is going to continue.
And like even after the announcement came out, like there's still a Figma product release like on Twitter every two days.
Right. And so like I think just just sticking to everything that they've done well in the past.
Right. Like just being very vocal, being like super friendly, just being known as a really humble and really friendly people
that build really good products and build and iterate fast.
I think like that's that's what he can needs to continue to do.
Like as much as he can say stuff like I think just doing what they've done well is the biggest thing.
That's just going to show any naysayer that, hey, like being bought by Adobe didn't change anything.
Yeah. So so we've talked a lot about Adobe and Figma, like 70 percent of the market, really.
Like these two huge energies in the UI space.
But where do you really see the UI space going in the future here?
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess to take it back to 2017, like the fundamental thesis that Kleiner had was like,
hey, like design is going to be an important part of like the product development lifecycle.
Right. And I think like that was kind of the initial starting point.
Right. Like in super, super like my dumb terms.
Right. Like it's like these designers are becoming an important part of the product development lifecycle.
They need purpose built. They're like collaborative by nature.
Right. They need a purpose built browser based collaborative tool.
And so that's like the thesis behind Figma. Right.
And I think like. I guess like I think it's grown a lot from there.
Right. I think like now it's like a lot of product managers use Figma.
Right. A lot of like front end engineers use Figma.
Like anybody who's like non-technical or technical has used or touched Figma.
Right. Within a product development organization.
And so like I think the future is just following that trend.
Right. Like I think they've already cemented their role within designers.
Like I think they're moving on to the kind of the next like the secondary functions that are going to be using Figma and spending a lot of their time in day and Figma.
Right. From just designers, I think they'll move into like front end engineers.
I think like my hope is that they kind of come to a point where like you can create a wireframe in Figma connected to a database.
You know, basically a fully functioning app. Right.
Oh, yeah. I think that is that is. Yeah.
I think that's that's kind of the future that I would hope they'd be driving towards.
And like you see a lot of that already. Right.
Like on top of a lot of the productivity stuff and a lot of the collaboration stuff that they're continually working on,
they're working on making these wireframes and these prototypes a lot more interactive and a lot more functional.
Right. And so I think the future for three to five years from now, Figma is like, hey, like, let's build a fully functioning app just on Figma.
I don't you know, this is not my not any insider information.
It's just my, you know, hand wavy hypothesis.
So I'm kind of running towards those that low code, no code space in a way.
Yeah, I think in a way I think.
But the thing that they're doing kind of differently is like it's a fully functional design tool.
Right. Yeah. Like I think it'll always be first and foremost a design tool.
So like making the design as complete as possible and not like dragging and dropping like a search bar, you know, a no code tool allows you to do.
And yeah, I guess like I think the future of like the design market is Figma.
Right. Like I think it's such an end of one company.
I'm a Dylan fanboy, a Figma fanboy.
Like I think it's such an end of one company that like I think it's hard to delineate between like how the role of design within companies influence Figma and how like Figma influence the role of designers.
Right. I think like both of those are kind of intertwined.
And when you can't distinguish between like how one affected the other, that's what I know.
I think you have a generational company.
Right. And so that's a really long winded way of saying I think the future of design is just Figma.
Exactly. Love it. Love the opinion.
We have one last question for you, Sean, and I think it's perhaps our most important questions.
We love to ask our interviewees and the guests that we have on a question.
Our question for you today is like what is one routine or staple you follow throughout the years?
You know, it could be something really simple, maybe something super complex, really anything.
Yeah, I feel like it's kind of changed over the years.
Like in high school, I was like super into like I like read the news every day.
Like I was a debater in high school.
So like I used to love like reading the news every morning.
So like, you know, like ninth grade to like freshman year of college, I just kind of did that religiously every morning.
And since college, I feel like I never really had a routine to my day.
Like every day was different.
And that was I don't know if that was like a good thing.
Never really had like a staple.
Now, I try to meditate for 30 minutes in the morning.
That's my post college thing.
Love it. That might be the most meta response we could have hoped for,
which is that your stable routine is you like to switch up your routine.
So I love it.
All right. Well, thank you so much, Sean.
It's been great to have you. Of course.
Yeah. Thank you guys again for having me.
I don't know much about this world, but I appreciate you guys giving me a place to speak about it.
Yeah. Thank you, Sean.
As always, I'm Crocket Callaway. I'm Sahil Seth.
This is Shyam Mani and this is Uninvested.
Thank you.