Part III — Figma's Orchestration Play: How MCP Network Effects Rewrite Software Defensibility
Act III of the SaaS Reckoning: The tools that can plug into the loop won't just survive. They'll compound.
This is the third and final installment in a series examining the structural repricing of enterprise software. Part I argued the $285 billion “SaaSpocalypse” was mispriced panic when it came to systems of records that could mutate into orchestrators of agentic workflows. Part II decoded Anthropic’s $380 billion valuation through the lens of orchestration economics. This final piece examines who benefits from orchestration and why the answer is not what the market expects.
Figma’s stock has plummeted ~70% from its $70B IPO peak, but it’s now undervalued as it evolves from a design tool to an essential orchestration node in agentic AI workflows. Via MCP integration and the bidirectional “Code to Canvas” feature, Figma captures semantic density and creates compounding agent-to-tool-to-agent network effects, rewriting software defensibility from seat-based metrics to flow control - separating thriving “throughput nodes” (like Figma) from commoditized tools, while …