Dylan Field and the design tool Adobe couldn't buy
Figma's $20B deal with Adobe collapsed in December 2023 under regulatory pressure. The independent path that followed turned out to be the higher-variance outcome — and the more valuable one.
This week
The most important act of a founder this decade will not be building. It will be deciding what not to build. Restraint is the unwritten chapter of every great company — and the next four years will reward it more than any cycle in memory.
The feed
PayPal Winds Down Venture Arm Under New CEO A Strategic Shift
PayPal winds down its $500M venture arm, PayPal Ventures, under new CEO Alex Chriss, refocusing on core payments and impacting corporate VC and fintech investment strategies.
Bezos Backs UK's CuspAI with $400M: A Signal for European AI? A Signal for European AI?
Jeff Bezos leads a massive $400 million Series A for UK-based CuspAI, signaling a robust appetite for deep tech AI solutions and validating European AI innovation in advanced materials discovery.
Japan's Go IPO: Robotaxis & Strategic Asia Acquisitions
Japan's leading mobility company, Go, secured $2.5 billion in its 2026 record-breaking IPO, signaling aggressive expansion into robotaxi services and strategic M&A across Asia, intensifying competition.
Karamo Brown's Kē: AI Digital Clone Enters Wellness Market A Founder's Case Study
Karamo Brown's Kē app, featuring an AI digital clone, pioneers celebrity-backed wellness, offering founders a blueprint for leveraging personal brands and AI for scalable solutions.
SpaceX Acquires AI Coding Startup Cursor for $60 Billion
SpaceX's $60 billion post-IPO acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor signals an aggressive push into artificial intelligence, aiming to integrate advanced coding capabilities across its vast operations and accelerate core programs.
Founders desk
Plate 01Cover · Issue 47Lina Ouedraogo
Three exits over fourteen years. A method built on saying no — and the long interview to prove it.
Plate 02Dylan Field
Dropped out of UPenn on a Thiel Fellowship, spent six years building a design tool that ran in the browser, said no to Adobe's $20B all-cash offer when the regulators killed it, and IPO'd anyway.
Plate 03Mira Murati
Was the CTO who shipped GPT-4 and Sora. Left OpenAI at the peak of its public arc to start a research lab — Thinking Machines — that raised one of the largest seed rounds in history before it had a product.
Plate 04Aravind Srinivas
Left Berkeley, left OpenAI, and built the first AI-native search engine — Perplexity — that took Google's most defended product and treated it like a research problem.
By desk
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