Sign in to view Michael’s full profile
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
Seattle, Washington, United States
Sign in to view Michael’s full profile
Michael can introduce you to 1 people at WunderGuide
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
8K followers
500+ connections
Sign in to view Michael’s full profile
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
View mutual connections with Michael
Michael can introduce you to 1 people at WunderGuide
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
View mutual connections with Michael
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
Sign in to view Michael’s full profile
or
New to LinkedIn? Join now
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
Websites
- Personal Website
-
https://michaelgifford.com
- Company Website
-
https://wunderguide.com
About
Welcome back
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
New to LinkedIn? Join now
Activity
8K followers
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisAlexey Navalny just posted a Twitter thread addressing the Russian people. Even it sounds counterintuitive or paradox, but I think we need to stand also united behind the Russian people because they – hopefully – stand up in Russia and fight for their freedom, peace and democracy! 1/12 We - Russia - want to be a nation of peace. Alas, few people would call us that now 2/12 But let's at least not become a nation of frightened silent people. Of cowards who pretend not to notice the aggressive war against Ukraine unleashed by our obviously insane czar. 3/12 I cannot, do not want and will not remain silent watching how pseudo-historical nonsense about the events of 100 years ago has become an excuse for Russians to kill Ukrainians, and for Ukrainians to kill Russians while defending themselves. 4/12 It's the third decade of the 21st century, and we are watching news about people burning down in tanks and bombed houses. We are watching real threats to start a nuclear war on our TVs. 5/12 I am from the USSR myself. I was born there. And the main phrase from there - from my childhood - was "fight for peace." I call on everyone to take to the streets and fight for peace. 6/12 Putin is not Russia. And if there is anything in Russia right now that you can be most proud of, it is those 6824 people who were detained because - without any call - they took to the streets with placards saying "No War". 7/12 They say that someone who cannot attend a rally and does not risk being arrested for it cannot call for it. I'm already in prison, so I think I can. 8/12 We cannot wait any longer. Wherever you are, in Russia, Belarus or on the other side of the planet, go to the main square of your city every weekday and at 2 pm on weekends and holidays. 9/12 If you are abroad, come to the Russian embassy. If you can organise a demonstration, do so on the weekend. Yes, maybe only a few people will take to the streets on the first day. And in the second - even less. 10/12 But we must, gritting our teeth and overcoming fear, come out and demand an end to the war. Each arrested person must be replaced by two newcomers. 11/12 If in order to stop the war we have to fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves, we will fill prisons and paddy wagons with ourselves. 12/12 Everything has a price, and now, in the spring of 2022, we must pay this price. There's no one to do it for us. Let's not "be against the war." Let's fight against the war.
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisRendezView.io got featured on #producthunt! https://lnkd.in/gtZBXsa Check us out today on Product Hunt and leave a comment/feedback. Let us know what you think! #startups #collaborationtools #remoteoffice #remoteworktools #remotecollaboration #digitalworkspace #digitalworkplaces #productmanagment #productmanagers #googledocs #jitsi
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisReal-time isn't just a buzzword--it's a whole different way of managing expenses, one that's faster, more accurate, and efficient. https://bit.ly/3fqV2Hy #expensemanagement #real-time #financeleaders
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisReady for a better way to manage expenses? Center makes it easy to switch--you'll be up and running in days. https://bit.ly/2XAzClv #expensemanagement #financeleadersMaking the Switch from Expensify to Center - Center®Making the Switch from Expensify to Center - Center®
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisCenter is hosting a webinar for finance leaders on Staying Nimble in Economic Uncertainty. Sign up here: https://bit.ly/2RgdgC6 #financeleaders #cfos #controllers #accounting
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared this🚀 Get real-time expensing and more with Center’s software suite and at _no cost_ with rebates based on spend volume. Most companies and organizations will save tens of thousands of dollars from their current processes and get far better insights and analysis of their spend. Also, we’re hiring! https://lnkd.in/gjHq7mRMichael Gifford-Santos shared thisOur very own Naveen Singh caught up with GeekWire to discuss Center’s new integrated solution aimed at streamlining the #expensemanagement process, from start to finish. Check out the full article: http://bit.ly/39H4OT2Backed by Concur co-founder, Seattle startup Center unveils expense management softwareBacked by Concur co-founder, Seattle startup Center unveils expense management software
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared thisWe’re building the future at Center. #expensemanagement #spendops #buildingthefuture #centercard #expensereport #innovation #ai #financemanager #cfo #controller
-
Michael Gifford-Santos shared this[X] Cool, diverse team [X] Great culture [X] Booming #FinTech space [X] Interesting problems to solve [X] Brilliant business model [X] Han Solo carbonite office pieceMichael Gifford-Santos shared thishttps://lnkd.in/g29Ejgt #productmanagers #productownerJob opening: Agile Product Owner / Product Manager at Center IDJob opening: Agile Product Owner / Product Manager at Center ID
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisGrad school taught me one thing above everything else: keep engaging with the "new." I'd been skeptical. Lazy. Maybe a little scared. But this past week I finally took the plunge with AI, and it's been a blast. Custom Pokémon cards for my kiddo. A productivity tracker with automatic calendar reminders. The creativity it unlocks is genuinely thrilling. Huge mahalo to Jessica Serrano, whose post connected me to Aaron Newton. I only made it to one of his classes, but that was all I needed to be inspired. And Chris Burzminski — your tips got me complaining then creating! If you've been on the fence: just give it a go. 🤙
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisOn April 28th, we are taking the Startup Grind Conference stage in Silicon Valley to pitch Gametime Hero. Brittany Bell, MBA and I have told this story in coffee shops, on flights, to skeptics, to believers. It keeps getting sharper because the work underneath it keeps getting more real. What we're building: an all-in-one platform for the organizers that everyone else overlooked. The coaches, the program leads, the community organizers running pickleball nights, volleyball programs, and adult soccer leagues with five different tools and not enough time in a day. We're giving them their time back. Let's go. It's gametime! #StartupGrind #Founders #CommunityFirst
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisI left All Things AI 2026 with a signed pre-release copy of The Human Signal book by Mark Hinkle. And that perfectly summed up the day and the whole conference. I went in not knowing exactly what to expect and left overwhelmed with things to think about, a handful of great contacts and genuinely fired up. Huge thank you to Mark Hinkle and Todd Lewis for organizing this amazing event. I wish I could clone myself and attend more sessions — it was so hard to decide! So I ended up using Claude to help me select the sessions that best align to my goals. Here’s what stuck with me: ***Don't think in tools. Think in systems. The tools will change every 3-6 months — and they are changing, dramatically. ChatGPT from a year ago is a different animal. So is Claude. If you're attached to a specific tool, you'll keep scrambling. If you understand the flows, the relationships, the architecture of what you're building — you can pick up whatever's available and run. ***Prompt engineering -> Context engineering. It's not about writing better prompts. It's about managing memory and curating the information environment so the model can't help but succeed. Too little context and it guesses. Too much and the signal drowns. The job is finding the right architecture — not tweaking wording. ***Human on the loop, not in the loop. Human-in-the-loop creates a bottleneck. Human-on-the-loop means you review and approve, but you're not a required step inside every workflow. Erkang Zheng shared in his keynote that his startup runs almost entirely on agents — 4,000 customers, human intervention basically reserved for legal and financial sign-off. ***Three tools that really stood out to me: Obot (MCP Gateway), Neo4j (Graph RAG), ToolHive (MCP Orchestration). All three showed up as demos and all three are now on my list. ***The happy hour conversation that got me: Someone with multiple startup exits told me this is the best time in history to be a solopreneur. You don't need to find a co-founder, to raise money, to hire engineers to build your MVP. You can bootstrap, build an MVP on your own with Claude Code or Codex, validate it, then raise if you need to. ***And then this: One of the recurring threads across sessions — said by multiple speakers, not as a soft landing but as an actual observation — was that the more we automate, the more we'll crave human connection and belonging to communities. And they're going to matter more, not less. Looking back at that room of 3000+ people, that feels about right.
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisWe don't just build Gametime Hero. We use it. Every day. We run our own communities on GTH Communities. We create and manage events in GTH Events. We build onboarding tools for organizers in GTH Pages. We use GTH Projects as our project management tool. We manage internal workflows through the same tools our organizers use. Why? Because the fastest way to know if something works is to feel the friction yourself. When we hit a clunky step, we fix it. When a form doesn't flow right, we rebuild it. When our own community page doesn't look the way we'd want as organizers, we go back to the drawing board. Dogfooding isn't a buzzword for us. It's how we build. Every product decision at Gametime Hero runs through one filter: would we want to use this ourselves? The answer has to be yes. Every time. If you're building a product and you're not your own most demanding user, you're guessing. We don't guess. We organize, we test, we feel it, and then we make it better. #Dogfooding #BuildingInPublic #ProductDevelopment
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisI joined the AIUC-1 Consortium. A few weeks ago I wrote about E015.3 — the tamper-evident logging control inside AIUC-1. The requirement that AI logs need to be independently verifiable. That post resonated because people are feeling the gap between governance on paper and governance in practice. As a contributor to AIUC-1's Accountability principles, this is personal for me. The system I've been building — AgentSystems Notary — is designed to make controls like E015 enforceable through code. Standards set the bar. Technology enforces it. That's what drives me.
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisProud to see our founder Brandon Bennett contributing to the accountability principles behind AIUC-1. #AIAccountability #AIInfrastructure #AIStandardsMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisI joined the AIUC-1 Consortium. A few weeks ago I wrote about E015.3 — the tamper-evident logging control inside AIUC-1. The requirement that AI logs need to be independently verifiable. That post resonated because people are feeling the gap between governance on paper and governance in practice. As a contributor to AIUC-1's Accountability principles, this is personal for me. The system I've been building — AgentSystems Notary — is designed to make controls like E015 enforceable through code. Standards set the bar. Technology enforces it. That's what drives me.
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisi was told constantly that i wasn't trying hard enough. i did zero professional clubs in college. my one internship had nothing to do with my major. but here's what i actually did instead: i had FUN!! i let myself be lazy. i was out every other day. i rested when i needed to. i built friendships that still matter. i made mistakes! there's this narrative on linkedin that if you didn't have the right internship, the right clubs, the right projects by 20, you're already behind. you're lazy. you didn't try hard enough. not that's not true at all. college is literally the only time in your life where your job is to figure out who you are, not who you think you should be. some of the most interesting people i know didn't internshipmaxx every semester. they just chilled. if you're reading this and feeling behind because you didn't get the internship everyone talks about, or you didn't join the right clubs, or you spent time doing things that didn't "advance your career" you're not behind. the competitive space is loud. it's designed to make you feel like you're not doing enough. so take the rest when you need it. explore the things that don't fit on a resume. go out with your friends. that's not wasted time. that's just living life :,) heres a pic of me randomly going to japan during my senior year. did i miss a few lectures? yea. was it worth it? YES!!
-
Michael Gifford-Santos liked thisMichael Gifford-Santos liked thisDone with Day 1 of All Things AI 2026. So much great information and such a great vibe! Getting ready for Day 2 - with a personalized day plan optimized to my goals that Claude helped me to build. And Art Deco Carolina Theater is just beautiful.
Experience & Education
-
WunderGuide
********** * ***
-
*******
******* * ******* ******** * ********
-
* ********
******* * ******** ********
-
********** ** ********
-
-
-
********** ** *************
-
-
View Michael’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
Welcome back
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
New to LinkedIn? Join now
or
By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.
Volunteer Experience
-
Board Member
Hawaii Island HIV/AIDS Foundation
- 2 years 1 month
Health
Create Ho‘okupu magazine to tell story of HIHAF, generating an additional $17,000 in revenue
• Redesign brand identity that honors legacy logo
• Update collateral documents, including stationery, forms, brochures, and signage
• Serve on ad hoc executive hiring committee to recruit and select new executive director
• Collaborate on organization’s first-ever strategic plan
• Update collateral documents, including stationery, forms, brochures, and signage
• Implement…Create Ho‘okupu magazine to tell story of HIHAF, generating an additional $17,000 in revenue
• Redesign brand identity that honors legacy logo
• Update collateral documents, including stationery, forms, brochures, and signage
• Serve on ad hoc executive hiring committee to recruit and select new executive director
• Collaborate on organization’s first-ever strategic plan
• Update collateral documents, including stationery, forms, brochures, and signage
• Implement OpenAtrium groupware system as board and staff intranet systems
Languages
-
English
Native or bilingual proficiency
-
Mandarin
Elementary proficiency
View Michael’s full profile
-
See who you know in common
-
Get introduced
-
Contact Michael directly
Other similar profiles
-
Parul Singh
Parul Singh
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Sloan School of Management
16K followersSan Francisco Bay Area
Explore more posts
-
Vic Singh
RRE Ventures • 5K followers
A Founders Guide to The Long Build™ - Physical AI Thesis Part III This one is for the builders. In this final post, my partner Will Porteous and I along with insights from builders in the trenches and investors who play the long game share our guide for founders building intelligence in the real world. A few core takeaways: • Sim before steel: Runway is precious, model the system behavior • Capital intensity is not the enemy — misaligned capital is • Build complete solutions before you talk platform • Hardware opens the door, software wins the room • Trust is earned through resilience, not hype
10
1 Comment -
James Haliburton
less-studio • 4K followers
If your design system was built for humans, it's going to fail an AI agent. Here's the gap: your senior designers carry implicit knowledge that never gets documented. "You wouldn't use that button variant inside a modal." "This component assumes a minimum viewport of 768px." "We never use red for anything except destructive actions." Everyone on the team knows these rules. Nobody wrote them down. Because humans absorb context. Agents don't. I'm seeing this become the primary blocker in design automation projects. The AI is fine. The design system is incomplete — not by human standards, but by machine-readable standards. Practical steps if you're thinking about this: Audit for implicit rules. Walk through every component with a junior designer who's been there less than 3 months. Every question they ask reveals undocumented knowledge. Add behavioral constraints, not just visual specs. "When this component is used alongside X, the following rules apply." Agents need conditional logic, not just token values. Test with real users. Still. Always. The agent generates the UI. Humans tell you if it's good. Put it in front of people before you've built the pipeline around it. AI automates production, not judgment. Budget honestly for this work. It's not trivial. Specialized documentation restructuring costs real money and time. But it's cheaper than rebuilding after your agent generates garbage for six months.
15
3 Comments -
Greg Shove
Personal Math • 20K followers
This is the kind of innovation every team should be creating with AI. Bowen Yin was perpetually annoyed by San Francisco’s complex parking rules - as someone who just moved into the city from years in Menlo Park, I feel his pain. So he fed a ton of parking datasets into Claude and used it to create a visualization of the parking rules on every city block (mine below - apparently I should move my car). This is what the AI conversation should be about - not hype and doom, but never-before-possible applications that make our lives measurably better. Sit down with your team this week and discuss: - What do we WISH we could do but don’t have the data, bandwidth, expertise for? - What annoys us about our day-to-day work? - Can any of those be solved by an “AI superpower” - research, content creation, analysis, strategy, automation? And if you build something that can intelligently merge my to-do list, calendar, and inbox, give me a call.
81
12 Comments -
Mayank B. Varyani
🪽⚡️AngelSpark • 10K followers
Reflections from 1 week in SF: - Dev tool space has never been hotter (emphasized by Figma's recent IPO!) - Agentic UIs and workflows are becoming the bare minimum - Fundraising is rarely a concern to founders in the Bay area. Founders are raising pre-seed with a Notion doc + hype (despite macro sentiment!) - Talent density is unparalleled (so much so that I met a cracked engineer living in his car just to be close to the Bay area) - Most founders I met were both extremely technical and could sell ice to eskimo - Vertical AI platforms could be huge disrupters to mom+pop shops….Think AI-native ERPs for niche markets: AI for insurance underwriting, AI-first factory optimization, AI enabled supply chain ordering for dentists etc. Verticalised solutions with a full-stack GTM, co-built by domain experts, with a network as a moat = 🔥 - Founders are truly pushing frontiers of innovation more than I've ever seen before. Everything from agentic deployment in <5 mins, agents working with agents, agentic browsers [see the trend?], fitness non (!) wearables, poop scanners, chat to 3D print & more - Tremendous long term efforts in bringing together the ecosystem for upskilling, knowledge sharing & connecting. Literally attended startup events held at a library, a community centre, a comedy club, an accelerator & the AWS's builders loft (shoutout Amazon Web Services (AWS) for all the free food ��� ) - AI on billboards everywhere (see pic!)
46
5 Comments -
Nick Ruest
Cognitum One • 26K followers
🚨 Build Sites Fast w/ Google Labs: Introducing Stitch The beginning of the end for the design-dev gap If you’ve ever: Sketched a UI on a whiteboard Described an app idea to a designer over coffee Struggled converting Figma to functional frontend code Then Stitch could be your new friend 🧵 What it does: Converts natural language prompts or images into polished UI designs. Lets you refine layouts, themes, and components via chat Pushes directly to Figma Generates usable front- end code in minutes Built using Gemini 2.5 Pro, Stitch is Google’s attempt to unify imagination & implementation Early signs suggest it’s more than a gimmick 🎨 From idea → interface → code, all in one flow 🔗 Want to build a website? 👉 stitch.withgoogle.com Full Release for My Ai Nerds: https://lnkd.in/e-yBRRW6 #AI #Technology #Innovation #Future #Creativity
16
5 Comments -
Jose Adrian Luna Maya
Official Moon Cookies • 5K followers
San Francisco’s Paradox I walked the streets of San Francisco recently. Between boarded-up storefronts and billion-dollar unicorn offices, I saw the strangest paradox: a city collapsing and reinventing itself at the same time. For every person leaving, one more arrives with a startup dream. For every store that shuts, another AI lab opens. That’s the strange alchemy of this city: decay and innovation happening in the same zip code. Entrepreneurship thrives in paradox. Great founders look at broken systems not with despair, but with hunger. The cracks become entry points. The collapse becomes opportunity. If cities have souls, San Francisco has one made of contradictions—and maybe that’s why it’s still the epicenter of big ideas. Hashtags: #Innovation #Startups #SanFrancisco #SiliconValley #Cities
2
1 Comment -
Aziz Afif - عزيز العفيف
SYB AI • 32K followers
The release of Google Stitch 2.0 marks a massive shift from traditional pixel-pushing to what Google is calling "Vibe Design." If you're a founder, developer, or designer, this update is designed to bridge the gap between "I have an idea" and "here is the high-fidelity UI" in record time. Here are the 4 major updates you need to know: 1. The "Vibe Design" Shift 🎨 Instead of starting with wireframes or grids, you now start with a goal or a feeling. Describe the experience you want for your users, and Stitch uses Gemini 2.5 Pro to generate high-fidelity, production-ready screens that match that intent. 2. Voice-Driven Design 🎙️ The new Voice Canvas (in Preview) lets you speak directly to your project. You can say things like "Add a dark mode toggle to the top right" or "Show me three different layout options for this dashboard," and the canvas updates in real-time. It’s like brainstorming with a senior designer who executes instantly. 3. Infinite AI Canvas & Agent Manager 🧠 Stitch has moved to an infinite canvas that handles text, images, code, and UI components in one space. The new Agent Manager tracks your project history and helps you explore multiple design directions in parallel without losing progress. 4. Seamless Dev Handoff It’s not just a mockup tool anymore. DESIGN.md: A new format to import/export design rules and maintain brand consistency. Direct Export: Move your designs straight to Figma with preserved layers or export clean HTML/Tailwind CSS code to jumpstart your build. Is "Vibe Design" the future of UI? For rapid prototyping and closing the gap between PMs and Devs, it’s looking like a game-changer. #GoogleStitch #AIDesign #VibeDesign #UIUX #ProductDevelopment #GoogleLabs #TechUpdates2026
14
-
Tim Maloney
Reservations Lab • 12K followers
💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab
128
7 Comments -
Martin Maričák
alt-shift • 3K followers
With Opus 4.6 release, "everyone can design, and code" this is old news now. With Agent Teams running simultaneously and coordinating without human intervention, we've moved past "everyone can code." Now everyone can... wait, no one needs to do anything. Designers and engineers are already obsolete. But now middle management is no longer needed too. CEOs finally have the bandwidth to make every decision themselves. Ultimate founder mode. But hold on: If agents can translate customer feedback into strategy AND execute with 20 coding agents, do we even need CEOs? And if there are no employees... there's no buying power. No buying power = no customers = no companies. Only code remains. AI churning software for no-one in particular. Why this makes sense: 1. No-one knows 2. Whaat? -- Just so we're clear, since apparently it's hard to tell these days: Yes, this is satire.
10
4 Comments -
Eliyahu Rosenbloom
FR Conversions • 6K followers
Figma's AI Credit Pricing Could Cost Your Design Team $50K+/Month. That's Not a Typo. Figma just moved all AI features out of beta. Credit limit enforcement starts March 18. I run a 13-designer team. We've been metering our usage. The math is brutal. Every Full seat on Professional includes 3,000 AI credits/month. Sounds fine until you realize a single complex Figma Make prompt can burn 1,000+ credits. Three prompts and you're done for the month. We're consuming roughly 2 million credits/month — and we're not even power users yet. Figma's add-on pricing: $0.03/credit. Our overage alone would run approximately $59,000/month. For design tooling. I did the math on alternatives to buying credits. A "ghost" Full seat at $16/month gets you 3,000 credits at ~$0.005 each — 5.6x cheaper than buying them through the official add-on. When your own pricing incentivizes gaming the system, something is fundamentally broken. Credits don't pool across seats. Don't roll over. Designers who never touch AI sit on thousands of wasted credits while power users hit a wall by day two. Meanwhile, the rest of the market at equivalent heavy usage for a 13-person team: → Claude Max — the model literally powering Figma Make — runs $1,300–$2,600/mo for the whole team on Max plans. Figma is charging you a 20–45x markup to access the same model through their UI. → Cursor Teams: $520–$780/mo. Full AI-powered IDE with codebase awareness. → v0 Team: ~$390/mo. Production-ready React components with Figma import. → Bolt Pro: ~$325/mo. Full-stack generation, 10M tokens per user. → Lovable: ~$4–$8K/mo at scale. Still a fraction of Figma's ask. Even the most expensive alternative on this list is roughly 7x cheaper than Figma's credit pricing. Most are 20–80x cheaper. Compute costs are real. But when your included allocation covers three complex prompts, you haven't built a freemium funnel — you've built a paywall that kicks in before anyone can evaluate the product. Figma earned its reputation as the gold standard for collaborative design. But reputation doesn't survive charging teams a senior engineer's salary to use AI features that competitors offer for a fraction of the cost. What's your team seeing? Has anyone else done the credit math?
242
68 Comments -
Matt Kim
Zypsy • 6K followers
YC just said they want more design founders. And they’re right. As AI makes building easier, taste matters more. And users today have less patience - if it’s clunky or unclear, they'll bounce. More founders are starting to get it. Today, design matters more than ever.
13
-
Paul La Monica
Barron's • 6K followers
Figma is rallying ahead of earnings. Will the design software stock get out of its post-IPO slump? The valuation is now well below the $20 billion that Adobe offered to buy it for a few years ago before the deal was scuttled because of antitrust concerns. AI fears have hit Figma like other software stocks. So have worries about compeition from Canva, which also could be going public later this year. But Figma just announced a partnership with Anthropic/Claude. My story on Figma for Barron's. Will update after the results are released following the closing bell. #figma #software #ipos #earnings #ai #adobe #canva https://lnkd.in/ekia3Af4
5
-
Varun Anand
Clay • 50K followers
I'm thrilled to share that Clay is one of 6 companies to join OpenAI’s new Frontier program. Tomorrow's best companies will run on AI across every function. Clay is already the creative tool powering growth teams at Cursor, Ramp, Figma, and OpenAI itself. Now we're making that same power available to enterprises through OpenAI's new platform. This partnership will allow us to help more companies use OpenAI's models for growth, sales, marketing, and RevOps workflows to find and expand their best customers. Here are some ways Clay and OpenAI help GTM teams use AI to grow together: - RevOps and GTM engineering teams can turn their CRM into a living entity: one that automatically refreshes, dedupes, and surfaces accounts that are ready to buy - Sales teams can score companies showing buying signals, pull verified contacts, generate personalized messaging, and sync everything to their CRM. - Marketing teams can build targeted audiences and ship relevant creative campaigns, from ads to landing pages to email I'm grateful to be building the future of GTM alongside OpenAI and this incredible group of companies -- Harvey, Sierra, Abridge, Ambience, and Decagon Learn more about OpenAI's Frontier Partner Program here: clay.link/kp6KIJy
1,036
53 Comments -
Nikunj Tyagi
Safira • 5K followers
Figma ($FIG) is IPO'ing at a $30-$32 price range! In 2012, two roommates from Brown, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, locked themselves in a dorm computer lab with the wild idea that professional product design could live entirely in the browser. Nights of GPU experiments and a Thiel Fellowship check later, they left campus for SF and began a years long sprint to prove collaboration in real time wasn’t just possible, but inevitable. The first public beta finally arrived in 2016. Figma was still only about fifteen people, but that tiny crew had gems: contractor‑turned‑leader Kris Rasmussen and GTM specialist Eric Wittman. Dylan’s blog post welcoming them held a promise: "these hires will shape the company we become". Kris, the quiet engineer who first joined two days a week, became the team’s moral compass, then VP Engineering, and five years later Figma’s CTO - proof that betting early on the right person can bend the entire growth curve. As the product found its voice, so did its design leadership. Noah Levin built the first dedicated design team from a single seat to an 8 person powerhouse, and Yuhki Yamashita arrived in 2019, rising to Chief Product Officer and hard‑wiring designer‑engineer empathy into every release cycle. The flywheel spun: bottoms up adoption, a fast‑growing FigJam whiteboard, and by this summer, 13 mil monthly users opening Figma files. I personally use Figma like 3-4 times a week. Now the company is about to ring the bell in NY: an IPO of roughly 37 million shares at $30 to $32 each, implying a core market cap around $13 billion (about $18.8 billion fully diluted) and perhaps raising more than $1 billion for the next chapter. Here’s the part every HR professional already knows in their bones: none of those numbers happen without the humans. The contractor who becomes CTO. The designer who scales culture. The product lead who translates vision into roadmap. Companies don’t list on the NYSE because they found talent; they list because they kept it, nurtured it, and let it lead. So, as Figma opens on Wall Street, ask yourself: Who in your pipeline today might write tomorrow’s IPO story? #HR #Recruitment #Staffing #startups #design #intern #newgrad #TalentAcquisition #Design #IPO #Figma #Hiring #Tech #Growth #Leadership #stocks #nyse
41
1 Comment -
Darnell Phelps
2K followers
🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI
2
5 Comments -
Daniel Kempe
Quuu • 3K followers
Just caught wind of Apple partnering with Anthropic on a new "vibe-coding" platform. As someone who's built multiple tech startups, I'm watching this space carefully. They're essentially upgrading Xcode to let AI write, test, and edit code automatically using Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model. What's telling is Apple's keeping it internal for now. They previously announced Swift Assist for 2024 that never materialized - their own engineers were concerned it might actually slow development down rather than speed it up. This highlights the gap between AI hype and practical implementation. I've seen countless "revolutionary" dev tools that promise to change everything but end up creating new problems. Every founder I know is stretched thin on engineering resources. The question isn't if AI will transform coding (it will), but how quickly we can integrate these tools without wasting time and money. The race is heating up - OpenAI reportedly looking to acquire coding tool Windsurf for $3B, Amazon backing Anthropic, Apple jumping in... Are any of you already using AI coding assistants in your startups? What's been your real-world experience?
5
-
James D. Wilson
I help PE firms, strategic… • 9K followers
Figma wants $10 billion. 2022 vintage real asset funds returned 0.05x. Bioprinting peaked at $186 million. Now it’s a trickle. Europe raised €5.2 billion in H1. Down 53 percent. Australia posted $11 billion in Q2 PE, per @PitchBook. The narrative is momentum. The math says stall. Private equity isn’t exiting. It’s re-marking. Firms are pricing their own assets. Then selling the markup back in. To themselves. CV squared. Continuation funds stacked on continuation funds. New fund buys old fund’s best asset. Nobody exits. Everyone books carry. No wires. No DPI. Just paper dressed as liquidity. Figma’s IPO isn’t an exit. It’s a comp set for funds holding similar trash. LPs still reporting growth. Still spinning cash drag as “deployment discipline.” Still calling 0.05x a timing issue. It’s not a timing issue. It’s a performance audit. And it’s overdue. Private equity now runs two timelines. The one they pitch. And the one the spreadsheet can’t hide. Capital raised. Capital not returned. That’s not a downturn. That’s a feedback loop. - If you enjoyed, check out my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gCzqichA #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #FundPerformance #LPInsights #DPI
5
1 Comment
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top content