Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down

Brian Halligan, Jason Lemkin, and Rory O’Driscoll dissect Figma’s 250% IPO pop — the largest since 1999 — and argue the money was structurally inaccessible, not left on the table.

• Figma’s 250% first-day pop is the largest since 1999; no institutional buyer had placed orders at $98, so that price only existed because the IPO priced at $38.
• Cognition acquired Windsurf, laid off 30% immediately, then gave remaining ~200 employees until Aug 10 to choose 80-hour 6-day office weeks or a 9-month severance package.
• Cognition+Windsurf combined revenue is ~$170M ($85M each); the round reportedly moved from $10B to $15B valuation, mirroring Anthropic’s own private-round price escalation dynamic.
• Ramp raised $500M series E at $22B (total capital raised $1.9B); Rory estimates Ramp needs $3-4B in floating capital to fund its corporate credit card interchange business at ~$700-800M revenue.
• Brian Halligan argues CEO comp is broken: post-2006 shift from ISOs to RSUs removed downside risk and dampened risk-seeking behavior; Dylan Field’s $2B PSU moonshot package is the right model for high-net-worth founders.
• CRV raised $750M and dropped its later-stage select fund; Jason Lemkin argues opportunity funds rarely add more than 10-15% incremental carry and are not worth the operational complexity.
• All three named Jensen Huang CEO of the year over Zuck and Satya; Rory’s argument for Nadella: as a non-founder, orchestrating the $10B OpenAI deal and 49% stake required far more internal political capital than a founder-CEO move.

2025-08-07 · Watch on YouTube