Inside X’s first all-hands meeting

Heading into the first joint all-hands meeting with Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino at X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, employees were asked to submit questions ahead of time.

Since Musk walked into the building literally carrying a kitchen sink exactly one year ago, companywide communication from him has been nearly nonexistent at X, save for his random, terse emails asking for things to be fixed in the middle of the night. The all-hands Thursday was the first time that both Musk and Yaccarino had addressed employees together. They didn’t answer any of their questions.

Instead, they spent most of the call, which I listened to, going through the features the company launched over the last year, along with Musk’s ideas for where the platform will go next. The only Q&A portion started toward the end of the 45-minute call, when Musk started reading public replies to a post on X he made minutes before: “Company all-hands happening rn. Post questions below!”

I wish there was something super revelatory to share from the call. But it was strangely polished for an Elon affair, a more sanitized version of the same routine he has done since he began the takeover process. I’m sure X’s roughly 1,500 remaining employees would love to know more about the company’s financial performance, what their stock awards are worth (an internal valuation has yet to be communicated since Musk took over), and when the company’s leadership ranks will stabilize. But no updates were given.

“We are rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everyone app,” Musk said on the call, which he dialed into from what appeared to be his home in Texas. “I think this is the fastest rate of innovation maybe ever for any internet company.”

Here are some highlights from the call:

The bad news for X, which Musk didn’t acknowledge, is that it has yet to win back the advertisers he pushed off the platform. He did say that he and Yaccarino would start doing Q&As together once a quarter and stream the next one externally on X, so maybe we’ll hear more about the state of the business then.

“The time to be concerned is not when, say, the media is writing stories about our company dying but when they don’t bother to write stories,” according to Musk. Rest easy then, I guess?

Since Adobe said it wanted to buy Figma for an eye-popping $20 billion last September, the two companies have been at an impasse. Regulators in the US, UK, and EU are still examining antitrust concerns about the deal, with a decision expected early next year. Adobe has agreed to pay Figma $1 billion in cash if the deal is blocked, which looks increasingly plausible as the days pass by.

While leaders from both sides have spent plenty of time talking about why linking up makes sense, they haven’t shown why, until now. A video published today by Figma gives the first peek at how the companies see their products intersecting. One example shows Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI engine, creating images to accompany a storyboard in Figma, while another shows an app prototype from Figma being dropped directly into After Effects.

In conjunction with the video’s release, I got to speak with Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief strategy officer and a key architect of the Figma deal, and Figma’s chief product officer. Over Zoom this week, we talked about how the two see their products working together, where the deal stands now, how the creative industry has changed over the last year, and more.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity:

Alex Heath: It has been over a year since Adobe agreed to buy Figma. The two of you are legally not supposed to be working together until the deal is cleared by regulators. So, how did this video come about?

Yuhki Yamashita: It’s funny. I’ve been spending a lot of time with customers lately. I always have. And the first question they ask is, “So, what are you guys planning together?” From most customers’ perspectives, they think the deal has gone through. And from that perspective, there’s just a lot of curiosity about what a combined world could look like.

But as you know, the deal is still being reviewed. And as part of that, we haven’t really been working together. So, we felt like there’s this missing thing of painting some ideas around what a future world could look like. And the reality is that, while we can’t actually plan together, we certainly can brainstorm together and jam together on ideas for what the future could look like. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We haven’t written a single line of code or anything like that. But when it comes to imagining, riffing, and things like that, those are things that we’re able to do.

Scott Belsky: Some of these ideas were also the ideas we talked about before we agreed to do the deal because we were imagining how all of this comes together and connects different types of customers. So it was fun to have a quick sprint where we could say, “Hey, just from a concepting phase — not a line of code to be written, but just from a brainstorming perspective — let’s share some of this stuff a little bit more broadly.” Because it makes us excited and we hope it makes others excited as well.

AH: Yuhki, I got to stop by and see you at this year’s Config conference in San Francisco. And I have to say, the energy there was electric. I called it Coachella for designers. Dylan acknowledged the pending sale to Adobe onstage and got claps from the audience, which, to me, signals a shift in your community maybe warming up to the idea of the acquisition.

You just mentioned that you have customers coming up and thinking that you guys are already part of Adobe. How recent has that shift happened for you where people are thinking that you’re already with Adobe, and what do you think that signals?

YY: When the acquisition agreement was announced last year, people had a lot of assumptions about what it could mean. And maybe some of the reactions that we saw were a result of just not understanding what it really means. But as we’ve had an opportunity to talk a little bit more about it, as people have seen that both of our companies are continuing to listen to our communities and customers, I think there’s this feeling that all these fears are maybe not well founded.

The other thing is that we’ve had the opportunity to listen to customers. And while we haven’t been able to plan together, we certainly have been listening to customers about the things that they want to see and the things that they get excited about. I think that the time that they’ve spent being able to think and imagine [for] themselves perhaps has gotten them also excited as well.

SB: I had the opportunity to attend Config as well. I actually don’t get to spend a lot of time with other product designers because that isn’t our customer base. When I was spending time with folks there, it was pretty clear that the product designs and experiences that a lot of these designers and developers are working on are increasingly including video and other forms of high-fidelity, rich content. They’re increasingly having to work with video editors and audio engineers and other people from other disciplines.

And so, I think that as they’re trying to build these great product experiences that include a lot of that content, the desire to have better integrations and better ways of working with those colleagues of theirs that are Adobe customers becomes more compelling. I think that story has also gotten stronger over the last year.

AH: What stuck out to me from the video is how Adobe’s generative AI work with Firefly could be integrated in a pretty intuitive way with Figma’s tools. Is that the main — and I hate to use this word — synergy you all see between the two companies from a product perspective?

SB: When we were doing this sprint, there were four things that really stuck out to me. One was easy ways of integrating Firefly throughout the Figma experience. The second one was connections between tools. You saw this example where the product designer sees this shoe, and they want to make a change to the actual 3D asset that was made in one of our Substance products — being able to click on it and go to the cloud document in that product and actually make some change and then come back and it’s just reflected. That could also be for Photoshop. That could be for Illustrator with a logo. That could be for anything.

Yuhki’s team also was thinking a lot about live prototypes in video. The crazy thing is that every digital company in the world that makes a video for their product, as soon as they film it, it’s old. So the idea of having this prototype somehow live connected to a video so that it almost rerenders with a change to a UI or an icon or something, where the design system gets updated and the videos that you use for marketing collateral get updated in real time, I mean, people are going to see that and hopefully be like, “Oh my gosh, if that were even possible, that would be amazing.” That’s something we can make possible together. I would say the fourth is just the interaction of design systems and fonts and other things flowing between products.

AH: The messaging from both sides when the deal was announced was that Figma would continue to operate independently after it closed. This video you all just put out suggests otherwise. How much autonomy will there be? Scott, if you or David [Wadhwani] ask Dylan and Yuhki to collaborate on something, will they be able to say no?

SB: The principles of this deal have not changed at all. It’s really important that Figma operates as an independent team because their customer base is so distinct, and also, they’ve got a great thing going. Certainly, we would want to only continue that. But also, the opportunity of being part of the same family gives us the option to do some of the things you just saw. That’s the point of this also.

We also are going to make Firefly’s APIs available to all sorts of third parties. And, of course, we would want parts of Adobe to use them, if not third parties to use them. That one’s a pretty obvious one. But some of the ones you saw were driven by the customer and what sorts of things would make their lives easier.

YY: While it’s certainly true that we will run our business independently and continue to do what we do, when there are these opportunities to leverage each other’s expertise and dream up these new and reimagined use cases, we’re totally on board.

AH: Scott, you all had to know that this deal, given its size, was going to be heavily scrutinized. But I’ve heard from you just now, from David and others recently, that you all have been surprised at how long it’s taken. How are you feeling about the regulatory process here?

SB: It’s obviously frustrating, but we recognize that there is a process governments go through, especially for anything this big. We’re doing our very best to just help everyone understand the story and explain and answer any questions. Unfortunately, we don’t have complete control over the timeline.

AH: What are the hurdles you’re still facing, and when do you all expect the deal to close?

SB: Oh, gosh, I mean, you’re probably asking the wrong person. The lawyers are fielding the questions from the various bodies. We went in knowing it was a big deal and that, therefore, in this regulatory environment, there were going to be questions. It’s taken a while. But I’m still confident because I know it makes sense.

AH: Does Microsoft getting Activision Blizzard done give you hope?

SB: It was good to see.

AH: You’re a pretty active tech investor and have been in the industry for a long time. If this deal for some reason doesn’t happen, what does it mean for the broader startup ecosystem?

SB: On the one hand, I have a lot of respect for governments having a process and having questions and having a way of asking them and getting answers. So that, I get. On the other hand, I want to make sure that when teams have great ways to come together and add value to customers and address questions that they got in a satisfactory way, they should be able to get going fast and start building again.

I’m a builder, and I’m a product person at heart. I know Yuhki is as well. We probably don’t love our time spent with lawyers. It’s not as fun as being with designers and engineers building stuff. We’re probably both a bit impatient.

As an investor, of course, entrepreneurs need to know that they will have many options for where their companies should be and what liquidity looks like, etc. That’s a healthy thing for the system, that’s for sure.

AH: Yuhki, I have to imagine the uncertainty about what will happen hangs in the air at Figma. I know that, in the meantime, it’s business as usual for you guys. But how do you lead a team through that uncertainty?

YY: The reality is that, as you said, it’s business as usual. There are a small number of folks who are pulled into conversations with lawyers to help conversations with regulators, educate them on the product, and things like that. But for the most part, we’ve really been focused on product design and our community.

When you look at the landscape of product design, it already is evolving, right? There’s so much that’s happening there around how products get built. So we just are super heads down on trying to help usher in that evolution as well as address everything that our customers are asking for. It’s certainly not the case that we’re sitting around waiting for this to happen. The work that’s ahead of us in either scenario is really clear. And so, from that perspective, obviously it’s nice to have certainty. But I think our teams have been really focused on that.

AH: In terms of what has changed in the last year around both Adobe and Figma, how much was not on your roadmap as you were putting the deal together? I feel like the industry changed so fast.

SB: The themes that we’re focusing on right now are not different from what we had planned them to be a couple of years ago. However, the impact and reception definitely have been surprises for us.

We have a new technology in generative AI, and you know the pluses and minuses of it. You know its strengths and weaknesses, and you have some ideas of how to integrate it into product workflows like Photoshop. Those were thoughts, right? But we didn’t have the feedback from customers, and we didn’t have the realization of how it would be integrated and how frequently it would be used. So those additional data points over the last year have certainly channeled more energy in the company toward the development of more models for more use cases.

We talked at Max about 3D and video. We’re all in based on all that we’ve learned. And if you’d asked me two years ago, “Would generative AI be important?” I would say, “Certainly.” We were shipping a lot of AI features then. But if you had described a disproportionate focus in terms of shifting of resources and everything else, I would have been like, “Oh, that’s exciting.” I would not have anticipated that perfectly.

YY: For product design, I feel like there are two waves of innovation that we’re seeing. One is obviously AI, as Scott touched on. It has been amazing to see what the industry has been doing. We’ve been prototyping a bunch of different things in this space, and we’re excited for what it can do both in terms of productivity as well as opening it up, product design itself, to more people.

The other one is just a stronger connectivity between design and production. This idea that your job is not done once you’ve just designed a few mocks. Everyone is in Figma because they’re actually building a product. Insofar as that’s true, what are the ways in which we can bring those two worlds closer together? That’s some of the reason why we launched things like Dev Mode at Config to contemplate developer workflows and, you know, ease that transition.

Snap’s return to revenue growth in the third quarter was welcome news to investors (I won’t say I didn’t tell you so!), though the stock price reaction makes it clear that CEO Evan Spiegel isn’t out of the woods yet.

Based on the changes he made internally this week, it’s clear that Spiegel has decided to bear hug the org chart, especially on the business side. Departing COO Jerry Hunter won’t be replaced. Instead, Snap’s three regional presidents for the ads and content business — Patrick Harris (ex Meta), Ronan Harris (ex Google), Ajit Mohan (ex Meta) — will report to Spiegel directly.

Hunter’s retirement isn’t much of a surprise to the current and former employees I’ve spoken with this week, especially to the ones who have been reading the org chart tea leaves in recent months. What has come as more of a shock is the ousting of Jack Brody, a longtime product leader who was elevated to the role of VP, reporting to Spiegel, just last year.

Brody had become more of a public voice for Snap and spent a lot of time onstage at the company’s most recent partner summit, where it lays out the product roadmap for the year. His sudden exit has sent the message that no one is safe and that Spiegel feels a sense of urgency to make swift changes.

During his companywide Q&A after Snap’s earnings report this week, I’m told Spiegel stressed that the company needs to improve its productivity and move faster. He even mentioned the lack of cars parked outside the office in the mornings and evenings. Whether Snap will be able to pull itself out of this tough period remains to be seen, but regardless of what happens, this week feels like a turning point internally.

Some interesting career moves I noticed this week:

I’ll be back next week. In the meantime, send me your feedback and story ideas. Thanks for subscribing.