![]() (Acton, meanwhile, told Forbes in 2018 that his protest departure was leaving $850 million on the table.) CEO Koum received nearly 25 million in RSUs in a retention package worth $1.9 billion at the time though he left six months before completing its four year vesting period, Facebook’s gaining share price meant his vested retention shares were still worth about $3 billion. ![]() Employees at the messaging app received 45.9 million RSUs, worth $3.6 billion at the time and more than $7 billion four years later. The gold standard for tech founder packages remains what Facebook offered founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, on top of the billions they were already due to receive, when it acquired their startup WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. More recently, Intuit’s $7 billion acquisition of personal finance site Credit Karma in 2020 also included $300 million in RSUs for “certain” employees: Executive officers received about $125 million, per filings, while founder and CEO Kenneth Lin received nearly $75 million in restricted stock, plus another $40 million in cash from Credit Karma’s board. Walmart ultimately shut down Jet.com in 2020, but Lore lasted longer, departing more than four years after the sale in early 2021. Walmart’s acquisition of e-commerce site Jet.com in the fall of 2016 for $3 billion in cash and $300 million in stock included a package of 3.5 million restricted shares for CEO Marc Lore, worth about $250 million at the time, and double that when they fully vested five years later. To find meatier retention packages in tech, one has to turn to consumer products. IBM’s $15 billion purchase of Mobileye in 2017, meanwhile, merely revised CEO Amnon Shashua’s vesting schedule for receiving more shares, while Okta’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0 last year included $25 million for employees and an undisclosed separate amount for its CEO. Salesforce’s 2021 acquisition of Slack and Microsoft’s 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn, both larger acquisitions at $27 billion and $26 billion, involved public companies buying public companies, and thus had very little in the way of additional compensation: none for Slack cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, and just $7 million for LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (incidentally, a mentor of Field’s). Still, it’s a historically large retention package among recent tech history, particularly in enterprise software. ![]() “If not for him, for the value of the asset that’s being brought with him.” (Recent tweets, perhaps, aside.) “Clearly they want him to stick around,” says Wolfe Research analyst Alex Zukin, who called the timing and price of the deal more surprising than its substance. Field, 30, has run Figma since 2012 and carries credibility with customers and the broader designer community, they say. To do that, Adobe will likely look more to the model of LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $26 billion in 2016, and which Microsoft left running largely independently in years since under former CEO Jeff Weiner (incidentally, a mentor of Field’s).Ī big part of that is retaining Field and his top lieutenants, and Adobe is paying a premium to do so. Beyond just taking a potential existential threat off the table, buying Figma also creates an opportunity to grow that business by integrating it into Adobe’s wider user base. ![]() (Wallace left the company in 2021).Īdobe’s stock is down more than 20% since the announcement, evaporating $29 billion in market capitalization and helping cause several prominent analysts to cut their ratings.Īdobe’s reasons for doing the deal, even at such a rich price, are simple, analysts say: The move pulls Adobe into the cloud, an area where it’s historically struggled to gain traction, while reaching a new cohort of design software customers. The proposed acquisition, which the companies said they expected to close in 2023, has provoked backlash among some Adobe investors concerned about its cost - 50 times Figma’s expected revenue for the year - and among some Figma fans in the design community, who turned to memes and reshared a Field tweet from 2021 that “our goal is to be Figma and not Adobe.“ The deal will make Field and cofounder Evan Wallace billionaires.
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