Links of the day - 24th March 2018

From the ycombinator blog, "Congrats Dropbox"

Dropbox impressed investors in Boston. It just didn’t impress them enough to write a check. We used to do one Demo Day in Boston in the summer, then fly everyone out to Silicon Valley to do another there a week later. So Boston investors had an entire week before any Silicon Valley investors saw Dropbox, and not one of them made a move. I think the party line was that “the space was too crowded.” Drew and Arash presented in our Mountain View Office on August 16, raised money from Sequoia, and moved to San Francisco.

Reading this part made me wonder how common this was. Iirc people are saying that other cities are becoming startup haven and that it's great that it's not just SV. I wonder how much earlier that could have happened if more investors had been willing to take the same risks SV investors did.

Figma launches their API via a platform

It’s crazy that a web API is groundbreaking in 2018, but to our knowledge, no one has ever created one for a professional design tool before.

By harnessing the open nature of the web, our API lays the foundation for unique forms of design collaboration. Companies are already using it to craft custom tools that meet their unique needs. For example, Uber created a live feed of what their design team is working on to raise visibility across the organization. GitHub automated part of their icon creation process to improve its efficiency.

Hot damn. In a past life I worked for creately. I remember during a knowledge sharing session I talked about the rise of the API age and how companies could gain a competitive edge by creating powerful APIs that allow people to use their product in previously unimagined ways. Or even ways that are easy to imagine but just aren't core to the product. At the time I was imagining how Creately could utilise an API to manipulate diagrams and let people create tools to generate diagrams based off source code for example. Or the reverse! The possibilities were endless. I'm stoked to see a design tool finally opening up a really useful web API. The fact that it's Figma is even more exciting since we use it at Buffer. I'd love to develop an SDK for this.

I also discovered the post that shares how Figma was built.. It's a pretty amazing look into a very complex piece of software.

Interesting twitter thread on #DeleteFacebook

Posted on March 25 2018 by Adnan Issadeen