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
Inference Chip Startup Etched Debuts With $800M War Chest
Etched, an AI inference chip startup, emerges with $800M in funding to challenge Nvidia's dominance by developing specialized hardware for transformer architecture.
Omnea Pays Employees to Launch Startups, Takes No Equity A New Talent Retention Model
AI startup Omnea challenges traditional talent retention by offering senior employees $250,000 and 12 months to develop their own ventures, taking no equity and fostering entrepreneurial ambition.
OKX Envisions AI Agent Marketplace for Decentralized Work A Vision for Web3 AI
OKX envisions a novel AI agent marketplace where autonomous entities 'hire and pay each other' via blockchain, signaling a potential shift in decentralized AI economies and Web3 innovation.
Drone Startup Elroy Air to Go Public Via $1B SPAC Deal
Elroy Air, a drone startup, will go public via a $1 billion SPAC deal to fund its Chaparral cargo drone, offering a case study for founders navigating public markets.
First 200 Black Women Founders Surpass $1M in VC Funding The BLCK VC & Crunchbase Index
BLCK VC and Crunchbase unveil the 'First 200 Index,' spotlighting Black women founders who have collectively raised over $1.1 billion in venture capital, marking a pivotal shift in the funding landscape.
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
Read with the people who build the next decade.
Wednesdays at 7am Pacific. One letter, four minutes, and the five stories that actually mattered — chosen by the desk, not by an algorithm.
- ✓ The week's five most important reads, briefly
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