Turn down $20 billion? Not a chance
Also known as "one road no enter market"
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This week, Figma, the collaborative design tool that democratised design (this may be the only time “democratised” is ever used appropriately with startups), sold to Adobe for $20 billion. The internet went up in arms, protesting how Figma’s founders had sold out. From where designers are standing, their grouse is legitimate. Figma’s founder once promised that his company would never become Adobe — the tweet that contains that promise has now been deleted.
Beyond selling his company, what this represents for a lot of designers who use and love Figma is the prospect of returning to Adobe. While I’ve never really gotten a hang of Adobe and its many tools, the consensus is that it’s pretty complex to use and well, it’s also not free. While users have their grouse, it’s a ton of money that would have been difficult for the founders to turn down, considering how choppy the markets have been lately. This deal now holds the record for the third-biggest acquisition of a subscription software firm in history and the largest deal for a private tech company at the time of the announcement.
There will be a lot of riffing about vision and mission in the coming days, but it may help to remember that, at the end of the day, startups set out to return massive value to investors. If you’re sure you could have turned down $20 billion to follow your mission and vision instead, kudos to you.
Moving on!
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More rambling on Nigeria’s “employees vs employers” argument
Last week, I touched a bit on an online argument I found fascinating.
Here’s an excerpt: “If you haven’t already gotten the gist of the argument, it’s that you might be good enough to kickstart growth, but you may not be good enough to move to the next level of growth. Interestingly, from this founder-first perspective, only the CEO, thanks to his vision, is immune to this need to be disposed of when the company kicks up the gear to the next level.”
I’m bringing this issue back up this week solely for the purpose of pouring sand-sand into the garri of the argument that employees should be discarded after they’ve delivered some growth. My weapon of rebuttal is this surprisingly honest conversation a Nigerian startup founder had with TechCrunch. Many parts of the conversation make for good reading but this part definitely takes the cake:
“Most times, your investors and board are present when it’s working. When it’s not working, it can get lonely. At one point, I took leave from work and went for some leadership courses to see if I could figure out how to improve my capacity because I felt like I didn’t have enough ability to run the company anymore. It’s things people don’t talk about; as a founder, there comes a time when we are not the most experienced to run these companies. Some of us actually don’t fit our CEO roles; if we had to be interviewed for our roles, most wouldn’t make the cut.”
Yet, (most) CEOs stay on and learn as the company grows, and if they’re lucky, their companies become successful. Like employees asked last week, why aren’t they given much-needed support to upskill if they’re willing? And why are some founders furthering the notion of early employees as short-term expendable tools?
While we wait for answers, we’ll endure another slow news week. Slow enough that this pretty good article about Flutterwave’s Ted Oladele caused a bit of a stir. Having joined the startup early and rising to VP, Ted shared his thoughts on employees staying at startups for a while. In the article, he provides three frames through which people can think of career growth.
The third frame is the age-old conversation of job hopping vs staying put and building a legacy. He argues that no matter how much you prioritise money, you’ve got to settle down at some point, especially if you care about building a legacy. Part of his quote from the article (You should read the entire thing) says: "Most times, people change jobs to get a better salary but if you find a company that cares about your growth all that will be sorted. If you look at all the best people in the world today, no one says this is how much the person earns. But hey, if you've job-hopped three times in the five years I've been at Flutterwave; you probably earn more salary than me. But you are not richer, because I've stayed at Flutterwave and built wealth."
Ted makes valid points, but on Twitter, that part of his interview was not well received. I’ve got to admit that my first reaction was that survivorship bias was at play. But I took a step back to try to figure out why the overwhelming reaction to that article was negative.
My theory is that a lot of people who joined startups expecting a utopia have found a different reality. Only a handful are at startups that care about them enough to provide a track to grow from ground-level employees to management level. So they sign up for a utopia but end up being jaded instead. Perhaps reading about someone else’s near-perfect story rankled?
But that’s even the easy stuff. There are more difficult realities, like employees getting salary cuts or getting fired after putting in their blood and sweat. Or ex-employees cheated out of stock options. At the one-click checkout startup, Bolt, which we wrote about in April, employees who were laid off say they were screwed over when the company was shown to have lied about key metrics. Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt at the time it ran into trouble, has now moved on to become CEO of a health tech startup called Love.
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But I’m getting distracted. Here’s what I’m trying to say and why last week’s argument ties into this week’s. There’s a wave of truisms continually thrown at Nigerian startup employees about how to think of their jobs and career progressions. That these opinions come from visibly successful people makes them pretty powerful tonics. But maybe it doesn’t quite play out that way for most people who try. In the end, there’s no right or wrong in these matters.
Depending on where you are in your journey, we’re likely optimising for different things. For example, job-hopping tech employees have opened the way for Nigerians to join global companies and have helped people dream big. It’s also helping employees to experience different work cultures that help them ask better questions. People who stay at companies for long and make career progress also show that startups can also keep their best hands.
In the end, it’s neither here nor there. So hop hop and hop, or stay for years, my dear tech workers…one road no enter market.
What I’ve been reading
How to blow $85 million in 11 months: The inside story of Airlift’s crash
FG suspends third airline as aviation crisis persists
My Name Is Awazi And I Get Things Done
Nigeria’s crude oil thieves are showing the world how to steal
See you on Sunday!