In the current environment, money-losing software companies aren’t exactly hot. The valuation from an IPO would be extremely disappointing for investors compared to the $20 billion Adobe is paying. A price/sales multiple of 10x would be generous, and that would be a $5B valuation.
Adobe's actually done investors a favour and made a realistic enterprise valuation of the company for everyone. If it's worth $20bn to them then it's not likely to float for $5bn. They clearly think there's value there or some kind of competitive advantage that makes the company worth that much.
The problem is that the company is worth $20 billion only to Adobe.
And that explains why antitrust authorities around the world are interested in this deal: that kind of discrepancy suggests a market distortion in progress.
I did not want this to go through, but totally expected it since I’m in the US and until a few months ago it seemed our regulators no longer cared about monopolies
Did people here really think that the regulators are going to allow this merger to happen?
Adobe might as well pay the $1BN break up fee and the Figma will just use that to fund their IPO.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33919862