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
How AI is Forging China's Multi-Billion-Dollar Micro-Drama Market
Generative AI is revolutionizing China's micro-drama industry, slashing production costs and accelerating content creation to fuel a market projected to hit $13.8 billion by 2027.
Peec Reaches $10M ARR with AI Search Tracking Growth
Berlin-based startup Peec rapidly scaled to $10M ARR by addressing the critical need for brands to track their visibility and reputation in the evolving AI search environment.
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.
What Mira Murati left OpenAI to build
She was the CTO who shipped GPT-4 and Sora. She left at the peak of OpenAI's public arc. Then she raised what may be the largest seed round in venture history — for a company with no product.
Aravind Srinivas and the company that decided to rebuild search
Perplexity's bet was that the next interface for the open web wouldn't be ten blue links — it would be a paragraph with citations. Three years and several billion dollars of valuation later, that bet is still running.
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
- ✓ One short interview, often unpublished elsewhere
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