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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Our regular listeners will know that we've been watching Figma's public debut, a rare example of a startup staying independent and scaling instead of getting scooped up by big tech.

Meanwhile, in AI, exits are looking a little different with billion-dollar acquiesiers and talent grabs that are reshaping how startups think about growth and MNA.

To dig into it all, I'm joined by Jay Doss, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures, whose back companies companies like Mulesoft, Square, and Box. Jay, welcome to the show. Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks for having me. Give us a little bit more of your background. How long have you been with Sapphire? And what are some of the main companies that are standouts to you that you followed over the years? Yeah, so I've been investing for over two decades now, and I'm one of

the co-founders, started out my career as a developer and then went over the dark side as my

colleagues who are still developers and engineers tend to call me. We founded the firm about 15 years

ago, and over time have scaled it. You know, we started out with five employees and we are almost

100 employees now and manage about 10.5 billion in AUM. We think of ourselves almost as founders

because we have built up the firm with the five founding partners to scaled out growth investment firm.

I would say over the years, you know, we have focused mostly on

enterprise software. So some of companies that we have invested, you already mentioned Mewsoft and

Box and Square, but also companies like Monday and J-Frog as some of the standout companies in our

portfolio. I'm actually curious to hear more about what it's like to start and scale a VC, but maybe

we can touch on that towards the end if there's time.

What I really want to get into right now is the Figma IPO, which everyone is obsessed over.

I mean, it's probably the biggest tech IPO of the year.

So Figma, for those who are living under a rock as a design software maker, we've been tracking

Figma's progress on the show for a bit now, especially the failed Adobe acquisition and what was that, 2023. Yes. Do you want to give our listeners a bit of a high level of what happened last week with the IPO, how the stock responded and how it's responding this week? We have been watching Figma actually all the way back when they raised their first series round when they had revenues. And they were

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